ABSTRACT
The South African Department of Basic Education supports an inclusive approach to education and advances a philosophy that sees learner diversity as a positive, and positions the classroom as a space that has to be managed to the advantage of all learners. The role that they play shows that they value education and consider the schooling of their children to be a necessity. The changed demographic composition of urban government schools should make critical dialogue about ethnic and cultural diversity an unavoidable part of inclusive education discourse. The findings show that the parents are proponents of education, and potential collaborators with the school. The parents' narratives about their educational trajectory are interwoven with their experiences of the Somali war of 1991. The parents' worlds spanned both private and public spaces, which is a shift from the situation when women from the community seldom worked outside of the home.
