There's a buzz of excitement in the community hall in the black township of Mzamomhle in the Eastern Cape Province. Up on the stage, the Methodist minister leads the prayers. The Mayor says a few words - rather, more than a few words for this is South Africa where ceremonies are lengthy, exhortations are the order of the day and everyone sits quietly and listens. Eventually, a young man and woman move centre stage. Past pupils of the local school, they've both been recently conferred with a BA in pedagogy and wear their gowns and mortar boards proudly.

Today, they're going to present certificates to a new generation of students who are moving up the educational ladder. One by one, the newest graduates step carefully across the stage in their long, red-trimmed black gowns, mortar boards balanced precariously on top of their heads.

To loud and delighted cheers, they accept their certificates then make their way down the dangerously high steps to the waiting arms of mothers, sisters and grandparents - for these students are only six and are graduating from playgroup to kindergarten. Their mortar boards are made of corrugated cardboard and their certificates state that they have participated in story-telling and singing, have played well with their toys and done their drawing. Education, at every level, is treated seriously in South Africa.

Across on the other side of the township, a similar ceremony is taking place in one of the primary schools, with children this time moving up from kindergarten to Class 1. Their teacher is Tenjiwe. When I first met her three years ago, she was struggling to make ends meet, earning her living working in the local playgroup and renting a room for herself and her small son in a neighbour's house - until he started coming to her door after he'd had a few drinks.

Since then, two good things have happened: Tenjiwe has found a better-paid job as a teacher in the primary school and, with her father's help, is now living in a shiny, two-roomed tin shack of her own. She shares an outside latrine with her brother who, to protect his sister, lives in a one-roomed shack close by. Electricity has been laid on but water she has to get from a nearby standpipe.

Tenjiwe's one regret is that she hasn't got enough money to buy the material to make a set of graduation gowns for her class and instead must travel to the next town to hire them from another school. "If I had 240 rand (about £30) I would make the gowns myself and then I'd have them forever," she says. However, like many teachers in South Africa, she is stoical and accepts that there simply isn't enough of anything to go round.

Most school buildings are occupied by two separate schools, one having use of it in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Platooning, they call it. With unemployment running at 40 per cent, food is short and many children come to school underfed. However, a government nutrition scheme has the two-fold effect of providing a basic meal for needy children - usually bread or mealie - as well as giving work to local unemployed women who prepare the food. Over eight million children thus get one free meal a day, benefiting from what is known as the Mandela Sandwich.

Zingwaswe teaches at the same school. Married to a policeman, she has a bit more money to spare than Tenjiwe. She drives a car and is adding on two more rooms to her house in the township. For the past three years, she has been studying at home to upgrade her teaching degree but is now dispirited and probably won't complete the final year.

"Since the election in 1994," she says, "correspondence courses have been cut back. Before, I studied at home but went to workshops and meetings every few months where I met other people doing the same thing. Now all that has stopped."

Zingwaswe teaches English and history to primary school children. The teaching of languages is a tricky subject. Under apartheid, black and coloured children were taught Afrikaans. Now, the teaching of Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu and many of the other official languages - there are 11 altogether - is promoted.

However, a covert version of apartheid still exists in some of the formerly all-white high schools. If a (white) head teacher chooses, all lessons in his or her school may be conducted in Afrikaans, a factor which puts black children at a disadvantage. (Coloured communities usually have Afrikaans as their first language.) Zingwaswe's son, therefore, attends playgroup not in his own black township but a mile away in the coloured township, where he will learn Afrikaans and thus strengthen his chances of getting a place at the high school.

The head of the high school is worried about the increasing number of black children applying for places at his school: "The government is asking us to cut our own throat. If these children have reached the right level of achievement, we have to accept them but many of them cannot afford to pay and we get no extra help from the Department of Education. It's causing problems with my white parents who are used to paying for everything."

Relations between the teaching unions and the Department have been strained in the Eastern Cape. The province is one of South Africa's poorest and allegations of money being shifted around from one department to another, of budgets being wildly overspent, of large sums of cash simply disappearing into bottomless pockets, have done nothing to sustain confidence between teachers and employers.

This month, however, central government has agreed to consider bailing out the province which has a shortfall of 1.5 billion rand (over £200m) - the result partly of malpractices but mainly of inadequate accountancy and inexperienced management. To someone like Tenjiwe with her modest needs, such a sum must seem unimaginable. To her pupils, however, it's the difference - although they are too young to know it - between a bright and a bleak future.