Gordon High School (City Of Cape Town)

Gordon High in Helderberg, okay so you are right there between the mountain and the sea and somehow the most scenic thing at that school is the fire exit. 1257 learners and only 45 teachers, that is a 27.9 to 1 ratio, meaning your teacher is basically a DJ at a festival trying to make eye contact with the whole crowd. Bra, that is not a classroom, that is a taxi from Cape Town to Bellville, everyone is packed in, nobody is comfortable, and someone in the back is definitely not paying attention. Forty five teachers for over twelve hundred kids. Do the math, which ironically nobody can help you with because your maths teacher is currently in three places at once. That poor educator is not teaching, they are crowd controlling. They wake up every morning like a soccer referee who forgot to bring a whistle. You raise your hand for help and by the time they get to you it is already the next term. And Helderberg is beautiful, genuinely, Somerset West vibes, the mountains, the wine farms, the whole thing. But there is something funny about having over a thousand teenagers crammed into a public school right next to all that prestige. The Constantia kids are getting one on one attention and Gordon High is running a group booking situation where the group never stops growing. Overall verdict: Gordon High is basically a concert venue that accidentally became a school, but somewhere in that beautiful chaos they are clearly turning out kids who know how to survive anything.