The heated protest over academic space allocation outside Addington Primary School in Durban intensified on Wednesday, forcing police to use stun grenades and water cannons to restore order and separate warring groups.

The chaos erupted around 1 pm when foreign nationals with children at the contested school arrived to collect their learners. Protestors gathered outside and angrily confronted them, prompting verbal retaliation from the parents and leading to a tense stand-off.

To restore order, the police battalion stationed at the school gates for much of the day intervened with non-lethal force.

Fearing for their safety, children were forced to run back into the school building, where they waited for police to restore order and allow their parents to fetch them.

At the time of compiling this report, there was no official information on arrests or injuries sustained during the police intervention.

The protestors, who were mainly members of the March and March Movement, Operation Dudula and MK Party, claim the school has been overrun by children of undocumented immigrants and that local children are no longer being accepted.

There are also unverified allegations that the school’s admission process is handled by a clerk who is a foreign national.

However, the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education has disputed some of these claims, stating that a majority of the learners at the school are South Africans.