Mathematical modelling is an area in mathematics education that has been much researched but conspicuously absent from the South African curriculum. There has been move towards re-inclusion of mathematical modelling into the South African school curriculum with the changing of the school curriculum. The purpose of this study was to explore pre-service mathematics teachers conception of mathematical modelling and the different strategies that pre-service mathematics teachers use when solving real-world mathematics problems. This study further investigated pre-service mathematics teachers ability to facilitate the understanding of specific mathematical modelling problems. Twenty one senior Further Education and Training students from the Faculty of Education at a University in KwaZulu-Natal participated in this study. In order to obtain appropriate data to answer the research questions three different research instruments were used to collect qualitative data. The open-ended questionnaire and the task-based questionnaire were administered to all the participants, whilst ten participants were chosen to be interviewed. The research findings emerging from this study suggest that pre-service mathematics teachers did not have a suitable working knowledge of mathematical modelling, but were nonetheless able to use their mathematical competencies to solve the three real-world problems that formed part of the task-based questionnaire. It was found that although the participants were aware of different strategies to solve these real-world mathematics problems, they choose to use the ones that they were most familiar with.

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