The Education Portfolio Committee was on May 31 briefed on 'Emerging Voices: Report on Education in South African Rural Communities' which was a study on rural education in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo. The Nelson Mandela Foundation, the University of Fort Hare, the Human Sciences Research Council and the Education Policy Consortium had been involved in producing the survey and report. The presenters covered the philosophy underpinning the research methodology and did not provide any hard findings, although these do exist. The philosophical approach of the Report was based on looking at rural communities as having potential within themselves to challenge problems of poverty and not looking at them as "deficit models" (communities where resources are so lacking that the only solution is to provide them with resources from outside).

With little time left before the end of the school year and exams, 1,600 Togolese refugee children went back to school on Monday in camps set up in Benin for refugees who have fled Togo’s post-election unrest. Children of all ages, from nursery school children to teenagers hoping to complete their final secondary-school exams, flopped down on mats laid out on floors of makeshift classrooms provided by the UN children’s agency UNICEF at the Lokossa refugee camp, which lies 18 km away from the Togolese border.