I have been working in South Africa recently. It is a very unequal country, and nearly 10 million children (55 per cent) live in families with household incomes of less than 70 a month, a shocking figure.
Yet South Africa is also a rich country. The lifestyles of the wealthiest 5 per cent are truly glamorous - spacious mansions, servants, swimming pools and expensive cars.
This inequality is partly historical, and arises out of the apartheid policies when blacks were banished to remote rural areas in pseudo-independent 'homelands'. It is these ex-homelands that are still the poorest places in South Africa.
My grandchildren go to the local Catholic school in Johannesburg, which is as diverse racially, religiously and linguistically as you can get, but not income-wise. Although there are a few subsidised places, most parents pay - an amount cheap by UK standards, but not by South African ones.
The school has a wonderful nursery that takes around 140 children aged from nought to six. The rooms all have verandas, and are grouped around a 75-metre grassy courtyard shaded by mature trees. There is an aviary with parrots and a spectacular jungle gym made out of tree trunks, ropes and tyres, erected over a huge sandpit. For the four- and five-year-olds there is a cycle track marked out with road safety features, where they can learn to ride two-wheel bicycles. There is a long stone table, with a thatched awning, which the children have decorated with mosaics, and where they can sit and do work.
The courtyard is a paradise and the children, almost always barefoot, potter about in it contentedly and busily alongside hens and several tortoises. The climate makes it possible to live outside most of the time.
Yet despite the relaxed atmosphere, everything is carefully organised and planned. Each class has a trained early childhood teacher, with an assistant, under the guidance of the head of primary (who has a doctorate in teaching reading), and the children will progress through the school until they are 18 (with equally good after-school facilities).
When I go to pick up my granddaughter, I have such mixed feelings. She enjoys the privilege of a nursery whose quality and continuity is enviable by UK standards. But most children there have to do with so much less.
Resolving inequality is a hard enough task in the UK. Whatever will it take in South Africa?
Helen Penn is professor of early childhood studies at the University of East London
1 Figure from The Child Gauge 2006, Children's Institute, University of Capetown. www.ci.org.za
