Sea Cow Lake principal reflects on 23 years of changing lives
Twenty-three years ago, Vineshree Naidoo entered the teaching profession uncertain of what awaited her. Today, she leads the school she has called home for more than two decades, carrying with her a conviction forged through thousands of lessons, countless pupils and years spent discovering just how far a teacher’s influence can reach.
For the Sea Cow Lake Secondary School principal, it is the moments that rarely make it onto a report card – a pupil finally understanding a lesson, a young person discovering that someone believes in them, or a former pupil returning years later with news of the life they have built – that continue to give teaching its purpose.
“The curriculum changes, the policies change, but that look a child gives you when something finally clicks — that hasn’t changed in 23 years. That’s what brings me back,” said Naidoo.
As World Teachers’ Day was celebrated on Monday, 5 October, Naidoo’s journey offered a window into a profession that has transformed considerably during her more than two decades in education, while retaining at its heart the relationship between a teacher and a child.
Naidoo has spent 21 of her 23 years at Sea Cow Lake Secondary. Her journey there began as a young teacher learning to find her authority in a classroom of more than 40 pupils.
“As a young teacher entering the education fraternity it was daunting at first, due to my age and inexperience at the point of entry into the profession. With all the training and education nothing prepares a teacher for facing a classroom of forty plus pupils with all their individual challenges and diverse backgrounds and cultures. I had to learn very quickly to gain classroom management skills and to maintain good discipline while ensuring a positive learning and teaching environment for the pupils in the classroom. As time passed I gained more experience and was more confident in the classrooms I was placed in,” Naidoo said.
Naidoo said that today’s children are growing up highly connected and surrounded by an almost limitless stream of information.
“I am no longer the source of knowledge — I am the curator. My job is to teach learners integrity: how to use AI to enhance thinking, not replace thinking. How to know when a phone is a tool and when it is a thief of their future.”
Alongside technological change are considerably more human challenges. Anxiety, excessive screen time, social media, difficulties at home, community violence and poverty are among the realities Naidoo said increasingly follow children through the school gates.
“We feed, we counsel, we mediate family conflicts, we do home visits, we look for shoes, we dry tears. If you only do textbooks, you will lose the child long before the exam,” she said.
At Sea Cow Lake Secondary, those realities have demanded practical responses.
The school secured donated JoJo tanks to minimise the loss of teaching time during water disruptions, sought donors to assist with breakfast and food hampers, joined the Department of Education’s feeding scheme and saw two school blocks receive a complete facelift.
Naidoo said the lesson became clear when academic interventions alone failed to produce the results teachers knew their pupils were capable of achieving.
“A hungry child cannot concentrate on algebra. A child worried about where they will sleep tonight cannot analyse a poem. We have to address the stomach and the heart before we can address the mind.”
Once some of those barriers were addressed, she said pupil attendance and academic engagement improved. And then came the results. Sea Cow Lake Secondary’s matric pass rate rose from 76.4% in 2023 to 90.4% in 2025.
But the change, Naidoo said, began when the school stopped allowing the percentage itself to become the goal.
“We stopped chasing the percentage and started chasing the pupil. Pupils were tracked individually from Grade 8 to Grade 12, while morning classes, afternoon interventions, weekend programmes, curriculum monitoring and additional tuition were strengthened.
What gets monitored, gets done. Teachers who didn’t see their own children over supper because they were doing extra classes. Teachers who paid for transport for pupils from their own pockets. Tears in the staffroom when we thought we would not make it. That 90.4% has a lot of invisible sweat behind it.”
It is why Naidoo refuses to regard the school’s progress as hers alone.
“The success of the school is not built solely on my leadership. It is through the collective efforts of an amazing group of dedicated teachers who’ve sacrificed their time and effort, whom I have the honour of working side by side every day, with our common goal of striving for excellence and achieving only the best for our learners.”
There have nevertheless been moments when the pressures of education made her contemplate walking away.
“Many times,” she admitted. What kept her there was a question she could not ignore.
“If good teachers leave, who remains for our children? South Africa cannot afford to lose committed teachers. Someone has to stay and hold the line.”
On World Teachers’ Day, Naidoo hopes greater recognition will be afforded not only to the teachers standing visibly at the front of classrooms, but also to the work taking place long after pupils have gone home.
“Behind every doctor, engineer, president and journalist, every profession is a teacher who once believed in them, a teacher who laid the foundation for their success. We are not just teaching subjects — we are nation-building, one child at a time, often with very little.”
And if one of her pupils were to walk into her office today and say they wanted to follow her into the profession, after 23 years of seeing both its rewards and its demands, Naidoo’s answer would still be yes.
“It will not make you rich in money, but it will make you rich in purpose. If you have patience, love for children, and resilience, there is no more meaningful profession in this country than standing in front of a class and changing lives.”
Long after the bell rings, the books close and pupils move beyond the school gates, somewhere in the lives they build remains a trace of the teacher who first taught them to believe they could.
