About our school

Dear parents, learners and friends of the school,

When I first walked through these gates as a young teacher, I made myself a promise: that every child who passed through them would be known — not as a number on a register, but as a name, a story, a future worth fighting for. Decades later, that promise is still the heartbeat of Stars Secondary School.

We are, by every measure that matters, an ordinary community school. Our learners come from homes rich and humble. Some arrive having eaten breakfast; some do not. What we refuse to make ordinary is our belief in what these children can become. We have sent learners from this neighbourhood to medical school, to engineering faculties, to teaching colleges and into trades they are proud of. None of them got there because they had the most. They got there because, here, somebody believed they could.

Excellence and compassion are not opposites in our corridors — they are partners. We hold our learners to high standards because we respect them too much to expect little. And we wrap those standards in care, because a frightened or hungry child cannot soar. That is why we feed those in need, why we open our doors to the wider community in the evenings, and why our phones are always on for a worried parent.

If you are considering entrusting your child to us, I invite you simply to come and see. Walk our grounds, meet our educators, sit in on a lesson. I think you will feel what so many families already call it — not a school, but a home.

— P. Mokoena, Principal