The student uprisings of 1976 marked the beginning of the end for Apartheid. So it is one of the many ironies of post-Apartheid society that education provision in South Africa remains marred by poverty and inequality. Despite its best intentions, the government is failing to address this legacy. Our Constitution guarantees the right to a basic education, including adult basic education, and mandates the state to “respect, protect, promote and fulfil” this and all other constitutional rights. The Constitution also guarantees the “full and equal enjoyment” of all the rights and freedoms it sets out. Yet the full enjoyment of the right to basic education remains largely dependent on one’s race, geographical location and financial means.
In recognition of this, the Education Rights Project (ERP) was established in February 2002 as a joint initiative of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies and the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. The Project will take an integrated approach – encompassing research, advocacy and litigation – in helping individuals and communities to assert and realise their right to basic education. The ERP campaigns for improvements in many aspects of education provision – in the farm school sector, in budgetary and infrastructure provision and in the prevention of sexual harassment – but some of our most important work will involve pressing for a more equitable way of meeting the costs of schooling.
Six years after the South African Schools Act’s (or “SASA” – Act no. 84 of 1996) commencement, it is clear that the state’s school funding and fees regime is failing. Failing principals and governors of impoverished schools, hungry for textbooks, stationery and sports equipment. Failing cash-strapped parents, who are required to plead their poverty in front of their friends and neighbours. And failing children, who are often denied access to the most rudimentary schooling, simply because their families cannot afford it.
To an extent, the Norms and Standards for School Funding and the legality of school fees perpetuate this inequity. The Norms and Standards for School Funding, published in 1998, use socio-economic indicators to direct funds to the most disadvantaged schools. The poorest 40% of schools receive 60% of the non-personnel budget allocation (which pays for things like textbooks, teaching aids and infrastructure improvements) and the least poor receive just 5%. But given that non-personnel spending in any case constitutes a meagre share of provincial education budgets, the absolute sums reallocated have been very small. All schools have been forced to find ways of topping-up state funding by charging fees.
SASA gives schools the right to levy fees, but provides that children must not be refused admission simply because their parents can’t pay. Parents are expected to apply to the school for fee exemptions, but can still be sued for payment if a School Governing Body (SGB) decides not to grant an exemption. Complex regulations govern the conditions under which parents are entitled to remissions. These regulations are often misunderstood and sometimes wilfully misapplied by SGB’s ill-equipped to enforce them and desperate for whatever funding is available. Recent research conducted by ACCESS – a children’s rights group – heard that, in one school, children of non-fee-paying parents were forced to sit on the floor, while desks and chairs were reserved for those whose parents could pay. The ERP is currently investigating a case in KwaZulu-Natal, where a school has allegedly made registration for the next academic year conditional on the “up front” production of school fees. Parents unable to pay have been forced to work in the school as cleaners and gardeners for nothing, in order to ensure their children’s continued attendance.
If confirmed, this is, admittedly, an extreme case. But it’s not just that the school fees policy is open to abuse by cash-hungry schools. The very idea of top-up fees establishes a clear link between a school’s resources and the wealth or poverty of the community it serves. Poor kids get poor schools, because that’s all their parents can pay for. Rich kids get swimming pools, sports halls, libraries, science laboratories and better-qualified teachers, because of the cash that wealthy families can afford to lavish on them. Since in our country wealth is still predominantly white, and poverty almost exclusively black, the top-up fee system serves to reinforce the inequalities entrenched by Apartheid, in an area of social provision which is vital to South Africa’s successful transformation.
It is clear that the top-up fees system violates poor peoples’ rights to basic education and equality, and the ERP is committed to help remedy this. The Project is in the process of establishing a fees forum, to discuss a wide-ranging political strategy aimed at pressing for a vital policy changes at a national level. Our legal work will seek both to provide representation and redress in individual cases of abuse, and to establish more wide-ranging precedents which will confirm that South Africa’s top-up fees system, and the funding formulae which support it, lead to wide ranging socio-economic rights violations.
School children helped to bring down Apartheid. The post-Apartheid
constitutional order must be made to deliver on its promise to free their
potential and promote their quality of life. The ERP will help to achieve
this.
* Stuart Wilson is a Research Officer at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand.
