St Stithians College (Sandton)

St Stithians College in Sandton, where the fees for Grade R are R132,270. Your child is FOUR YEARS OLD. They are eating glue and crying at nap time, and you are paying more than most people's annual salary just for the privilege. By the time they reach Grade 12, you are sitting at R199,680 a year, which is basically a bond repayment, except the collateral is your kid doing a mediocre Shakespeare monologue at the year-end concert and calling it "holistic development." They have 2,637 learners on that campus, which means this is basically a small town with a Christian ethos and a tuck shop. The learner to educator ratio is 8.2 to 1, so every teacher is basically a personal butler. Eight kids per teacher and yet somehow Liam still failed Maths. That is not a resource problem, that is a Liam problem. The school is sitting in Lyme Park, Sandton, which means the parking lot on sports day looks like a BMW dealership and everyone's lunchbox has a separate compartment for the hummus. Now the Christian ethos. Look, we respect it. But paying R199,680 a year and STILL having to sit through a chapel service on a cold Highveld morning? Baba, that is not faith, that is irony. Overall verdict: St Stithians is basically what happens when a private school and a five-star hotel have a baby and raise it on Bible verses and debit orders, but genuinely, the kids come out sharp and the facilities are probably incredible.