As the winter school holidays hand over to the third term across South Africa, Catch Up Kids is urging families to use the mid-year break as an opportunity to steady young learners rather than merely pause. The Johannesburg-based practice offers specialised one-on-one tutoring for children with ADHD, learning difficulties and developmental delays, working with them at home and at its centres, and July has become one of the busiest moments on its calendar as parents look toward the second half of the school year.
The logic is simple. The foundation phase, spanning the earliest school years through Grade 3, is where reading, writing and number sense take hold. When a child in these grades slips behind, the gap seldom closes by itself, and every new term stacks fresh content on top of skills that were never fully secured. The calmer weeks around the holidays and the clean start of a new term give families space to pinpoint where a child is struggling and to put focused support in place before the strain of assessments returns.
Catch Up Kids works with children who have ADHD, Attention Deficit Disorder, Sensory Processing Disorder, and a range of learning difficulties and developmental delays. Instead of general homework help, the practice zeroes in on the specific foundational skills a child has missed, meeting each learner where they are and building up from there. Its ADHD Tutors are accustomed to working with children whose attention drifts, who lose focus midway through a task, or who need instruction paced and structured differently from a crowded mainstream classroom.
A key part of the approach is that it complements, rather than replaces, the other professionals in a child’s life. The practice places its Remedial Tutors alongside teachers and therapists, coordinating with school teams so that the support a child gets at home or at a centre reinforces what is happening in the classroom and in therapy. The goal is not to remove a child from mainstream education but to give them the foundational skills they need to stay in it and thrive, without assuming that a remedial school placement is the only path.
Support is provided in whatever form suits the family. Some children are tutored in their own homes, where they feel most at ease and where routines are already in place. Others attend sessions at one of the practice’s centres, and for families who cannot travel easily, sessions can be run remotely over Zoom. That flexibility matters most for children who find new settings unsettling, and it means distance need not decide whether a child gets help.
Catch Up Kids operates across several of South Africa’s largest cities. In Johannesburg it runs centres in Waverley, Highlands North and Douglasdale. It also has a presence in Durban North, in Pretoria, and in Cape Town at Sea Point. That reach lets the practice serve families in the country’s main metropolitan areas while holding onto the one-on-one, in-person model that sits at the heart of its work.
For parents who sense something is holding their child back but are unsure what, the practice offers an initial developmental consultation and an ADHD checklist tool to help make sense of the early signs. These are starting points rather than diagnoses, giving a family a clearer view of where a child stands and what kind of support might help. Working this out early, instead of waiting for a pattern of struggle to set in, is often what makes the difference over a school year.
The broader context lends this work its urgency. Foundation phase literacy and numeracy have been a long-running concern in South African education, and children who reach the end of the early grades without secure reading and number skills tend to carry that deficit forward. For a child who also has ADHD or a developmental delay, the everyday demands of a full classroom can make catching up unaided even harder. Focused, individual attention from Special Needs Tutors who understand how these children learn is one of the more practical answers open to families.
Catch Up Kids frames the third term as a time to be proactive. First-half reports have arrived, patterns from earlier terms are clear, and there is still enough of the school year left for steady, consistent support to shift a child’s trajectory. Acting in July, rather than waiting for year-end results, gives a child the runway to consolidate skills before the next round of assessments.
The practice keeps its message grounded. It makes no promise of overnight transformation. What it offers is patient, structured, individual work that meets a child at their level and builds the foundations they need, term by term, in partnership with the family and the school. For many children with ADHD, learning difficulties or developmental delays, that steady bridging of gaps is precisely what has been missing.
Parents who want to understand how the practice works, where its centres are, and how to arrange an initial consultation can find full details on the Catch Up Kids website at https://catchupkids.co.za/.
About Catch Up Kids
Catch Up Kids provides specialised one-on-one tutoring for children with ADHD, learning difficulties and developmental delays. With a focus on the foundation phase, the practice targets the specific skills a child has missed and works alongside teachers and therapists to help children succeed in mainstream classrooms. Support is offered in the home, at centres in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban North and Cape Town, and remotely over Zoom.
Media Contact
Catch Up Kids
Email: info@catchupkids.co.za
Phone: +27 11 440 1666
Website: https://catchupkids.co.za/
