Creating a Caring School: A Guide for School Management Teams is intended to assist school leadership and management to better understand and address the socio-economic context of schooling and the barriers to education, in particular HIV and AIDS and poverty, that the majority of South Africa's learners face daily. Addressing these barriers is a prerequisite for teaching and learning to take place. A number of workable school-based interventions are presented in the Guide and Toolkit, these include, the strengthening of school nutrition programmes and the implementation of aftercare and counselling support. Given the multidimensional nature of HIV and AIDS and poverty and its related socio-economic problems, an integrated, cross-sectoral approach is proposed for addressing the challenges facing education.