Struggle: Schoolchildren often cannot go to school when roads and buildings have been damaged. Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
The department of basic education has failed to ensure that the schooling system has adequate resources to protect it against the climate crisis, a new report says.
The report, released on Wednesday and spearheaded by social justice group Section27, says climate change has reduced educational attainment in various ways, such as damage to school infrastructure from extreme weather such as floods.
The sector has been indirectly affected through food insecurity, air pollution and health, the report adds.
“Yet the basic education sector is hardly involved in climate change discourse when it is directly influencing the future leaders of our country,” Tatiana Kazim, a senior legal researcher at Equal Education Law Centre, said at the report’s launch.
The report also mentions heat exposure in schools, especially in mobile classrooms and those built from inappropriate materials that trap heat such as prefabricated sheeting and corrugated iron roofs.
“The use of these materials, coupled with poor ventilation and overcrowding, results in very hot classrooms, which in turn results in poor educational attainment,” it says.
Studies have shown that learners writing examinations in classrooms with a temperature of 30°C scored 20% lower in tests compared with those in classrooms with a temperature of 20°C.
The heat led to drowsiness, poor concentration and thirst, as reported by the affected students.
Another vulnerability of the education system identified by the report is dilapidated school infrastructure that cannot withstand the effects of flooding and severe storms. The April 2022 floods in KwaZulu-Natal are an example of the devastating effects of climate change on school infrastructure. During this period, more than 630 schools were damaged.
The destruction of roads also prevented many learners from going to school.
In one of the cases Section27 is litigating, schools in Limpopo that are in a severely dilapidated state as a result of longstanding lack of maintenance and storm damage were promised renovations and refurbishments by the Limpopo department of education.
One of these schools has been waiting for these repairs since 2012.
“The increased occurrence of extreme weather events is anticipated, and these school buildings are unlikely to survive floods and severe storms, resulting in a safety risk to learners and extended periods during which learners will not be able to attend school,” Motheo Brodie, an attorney at Section27, said during the launch of the report.
Based on the Norms and Standards for School Infrastructure gazetted by the government in 2013 and amended by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshega in 2022, dilapidated infrastructure should have been completed by November 2023.
“These conditions make the basic education system in South Africa particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” said Kazim.
In August 2023, the education department reported that 3 932 public schools still had pit toilets on school premises and 728 schools used only pit toilets.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child says the climate emergency, the collapse of biodiversity and pervasive pollution are “an urgent and systemic threat to children’s rights globally”, a view echoed by Section27 in its report on addressing the climate risks for schools.
“Like most vulnerable groups, children are vulnerable due to their position in society, but they also face vulnerability due to their unique metabolism, physiology, and developmental needs,” it says.
To mitigate these issues, the report says schools must be designed to be more climate-resilient, with infrastructure constructed from appropriate materials.
It calls on the department of basic education to put systems in place for remote learning to ensure the continuity of the educational programme in the aftermath of extreme weather events, especially in cases where schools may be inaccessible because schools and roads have been damaged.