View the Prize Giving photos on Flickr
Thursday 9 February 23: Prize Giving, the annual academic highlight in which we recognise and celebrate the academic achievements of our students during the previous year, was held in the Clegg Hall filled to capacity with our boys, Wynberg families, and special guests.
Congratulations to the winners and recipients of special awards announced on the night.
Ryno Greenwall Prize for the most original History Project – Ignatius Beets who received 100% for his project.
Smyly Trophy for the best performance in the Science Expo – Tristan Butters and Andrew Killick were both awarded 97%.
Old Boys Maths Prize awarded for the best performance at the UCT Maths Competition – Farhan Omar (individual); Seb de Klerk and Fayaaz Ebrahim (pairs). Farhan was placed 6th overall and Seb and Fayaaz placed 1st.
The Vincent Grainger Memorial Prize is awarded to the boy/s who reached round 3 of the South African Maths Olympiad – Zac Botha, Luca Caronti, and Hamzah Loonat all made it to Round 3.
The Pippa Richardson Shield for service to the community – Tristan Ely is re-awarded the Shield.
The Donald Simons Award for the greatest academic improvement in Grade 9 – Arno Pienaar who improved by 12.58%.
Stan Jones Prize awarded to a Grade 11 student who has shown the most all-round improvement in academic and sporting endeavours over a period of time – Cole Janse-van Rensburg improved academically by 15.87%.
Alf Morris Award to an all-rounder – Matthew Thomas, our Multi-Media Prefect this year who continues to give up hours of his time for the school while still maintaining his involvement in the other pillars of the school.
Fine Family Bursary – Tyrone Gombe achieved a 70% average, and represented WP Rugby.
Anthony Morris Prize to the boy who showed the most loyalty to the school through school participation – shared by Ross Prinsloo and Achmat Behardien.
David Levitt Memorial Trophy awarded to the Grade 10 student who is an inspiration to his peers through his involvement – Beni Hansen.
The Neil & Cecil Jowell Award to a boy for demonstrating Wynberg Values and significant determination and perseverance and who, in doing so, epitomised the school’s values – Samuel Taberner has shown extreme perseverance over the last couple of years and truly embodies the true Wynberg spirit of ‘overcoming difficulties”.
Headmaster, Mr Deon Scheepers, reports on WBHS 2022:
Welcome to the 2023 Prize Giving ceremony, a highlight on the annual school calendar.
It is very important for modern organisations to keep on improving by building on past traditions as a foundation for the future.
The author of several leadership studies, Deming, describes the concept of continuous improvement as ‘initiatives that increase successes and reduce failures.’
It is also described as a company-wide process of focused and continuous incremental innovation. this culture of sustained improvement involves all members of the organisation, from all organisational levels, working together to make improvements without necessarily making huge capital investments.
Continuous improvement can occur through evolutionary improvement during which radical changes occur, or through incremental improvements to an existing and well-functioning system, like Wynberg Boys’ High School.
However, what is important to realise is that major improvements often take place over time as a result of numerous incremental improvements.
In the early 1990’s, Robert Kaplan and David Norton developed a methodology that translates the objectives of organisations into measures and goals.
They devised an instrument, namely the balanced scorecard, to clarify and update strategy, link the objectives of the organisation to annual budgets, allow organisational change, and increase the understanding of the company vision and mission statements across the organisation.
By using the balanced scorecard, performance measures can be quantified and appraised, hence it can be measured whether an organisation has achieved the desired results.
Should one apply the balanced scorecard to Wynberg Boys’ High during the year 2022, the performance of the school can be measured from four different perspectives, namely from:
- a customer perspective
- an internal perspective
- the perspective of innovation and learning, and, finally
- from a financial perspective
Firstly, our performance from a customer perspective:
- The school’s focus remains to provide a value-added service to our primary customers, namely our boys, staff, parents, and the wider community, which includes our old boys.
- We have continued in 2022, and post covid, to expose our boys to the four pillars that are the foundation of our approach to ensure a well-rounded education, namely the academic, sport, cultural, and service pillars.
- Academics remain our core business and we are proud of the academic performance of the class of ‘22: the biggest matric group of the past five years wrote the NSC examination and 99.5% passed. 86% obtained a bachelor’s pass.
- At the end of ’22, the Grade 8s achieved a 100% pass rate; the Grade 9s a 99% pass rate; the Grade 10s a 100% pass rate, and the Grade 11s a 98% pass rate.
- In terms of sport, our boys are competing against the majority of the top schools in South Africa in our various sporting codes on an annual basis and we are holding more than our own.
- Several boys were selected for the province in various sporting codes in 2022, and we are especially proud having produced both the S.A. Schools’ rugby captain, Zach Porthen, and the S.A. Schools’ cricket captain, Juan James, in 2022.
- Our cultural activities include a vibrant music department where the choir, vocal ensemble, pipe band, and concert band, to name but a few, offer music opportunities for our boys to excel musically.
- We successfully staged the music production ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ in 2022 and received numerous compliments and accolades for the high standard and professional approach of the production.
- Our boys were fully involved in service and supported our local communities in 2022 in various initiatives: the sandwich project; boots initiative; sanitary pad initiative and Christmas project, to name but a few, were well-supported and well-received.
- Our approach to pastoral care enabled our boys to find a safe place at school where they have the freedom to explore and develop based on our value system of honesty, empathy, inclusivity, respect, and to go beyond their own limitations.
- We are proud of our highly experienced and dedicated staff, and we make a concerted effort to connect, coach, and celebrate our staff. Staff recruitment, staff development, staff compensation, and staff retention are all part of our vision towards 2025, and beyond.
- We value our parents and through an extremely committed and dedicated SGB, regular termly meetings with parents, and weekly electronic communication we are continually striving to keep our parents fully informed and part of the Wynberg family.
- Our digital footprint is continually growing, and the weekly newsletter now reaches close to 2500 stakeholders. Our official social media channels include Flickr with 11 million cumulative photo views in 2022, YouTube with 3.5 million impressions, mostly live streamed, Facebook with a following of more than 20 000, Instagram with a following of more than 10 000 and tik tok with close to 29 000 followers.
Secondly, our performance from an internal perspective:
The Vision 2025 Indaba to discuss the school’s strategic vision for the next three years was held in September last year. All staff were involved and the indaba also included members of the SGB.
By revisiting the school’s DNA, and its core values of honesty, excellence, inclusivity, respect, and ‘Supera Moras’ or overcoming difficulties, our boys, staff, and old boys are identified as the ‘heirs’, an acronym of our values, of the rich traditions and heritage of the school.
This also makes them custodians with the responsibility to pass this on to future generations of Wynberg men.
The following areas were identified as the main focus to achieve excellence at our school by 2025:
Education innovation; sporting excellence; multi-cultural excellence that includes service; a pastoral ‘caring’ approach with the emphasis on building resilience and empathy; staff wellbeing; 360 degree communication; focused alignment with our feeder schools, tertiary institutions and industry and, finally, identifying and exploring resources.
Thirdly, our performance from the perspective of innovation and learning:
- The school adopted a paperless system almost 12 years ago whereby our boys use modern technology in the form of laptops or devices and e-books in modern-day classrooms.
- A modern, state-of-the-art engineering and design faculty was recently built to expose our boys to cutting-edge technology and to prepare them for the future.
- By using Microsoft, we have enabled many subjects to create a digital textbook that contains notes, links to web resources, videos, quizzes, and other useful information.
- Online formative assessment is used on a daily basis and many lessons are recorded so that boys may review lessons at a later stage.
- We introduced the ignite programme during the first semester of 2022 to our Grade 8 students during which we focused on developing their reading and numeracy skills, as well as general concepts that underpin content which include 21st-century skills like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.
- From 2023, the teaching philosophy in the classrooms will be to develop reading and comprehension skills and boys will be enabled to read with insight and to apply their higher cognitive functions.
And, finally, our performance from a financial perspective:
Should the school be assessed from a financial perspective, Wynberg Boys’ High provides a fantastic return on a parent’s investment in their son’s education.
Although the school is a non-profit organisation, all stakeholders can be very pleased with how the school’s finances are managed.
The school’s financial strategy, financial implementation, and financial management have contributed to establishing world-class facilities on par with most, if not all, private schools in South Africa but at a fraction of their annual school fees.
We have managed to keep our annual increase in school fees extremely reasonable for 2023 and without compromising the quality of a Wynberg Boys’ High education.
Although the financial analyses of most organisations tend to have a backward-looking focus, it is important to note that the school is also busy with some exciting projects at the moment.
In conclusion, should one apply the balanced scorecard to evaluate the performance of the school from the perspective of our customers, our internal processes, the perspective of innovation and learning as well as from a financial perspective, it is evident that Wynberg Boys’ High has enjoyed a very successful year.
The leadership guru John C. Maxwell has the following to say about a successful organisation, and I quote:
“Commitment to continual improvement is the key to reaching your potential and to being successful.”
Wynberg Boys’ High School finds itself in the cauldron of South African education and the challenges that all schools currently face are enormous.
however, with a philosophy and a vision focused on excellence, learning, and innovation, the school will continually strive to set the benchmark for excellence in education in South Africa, and beyond.
I thank you!
Please find the full list of prize winners in the online programme:
