Schoolchildren are being kicked off school buses during the current exam period because provincial education departments have scrapped some transport subsidies. And certain schools are now illegally refusing to register children whose parents cannot prepay fees for next year.
These problems emerge from personal testimonies the newly formed Education Rights Project (ERP) is gathering as its countrywide work to understand — and intervene in — the real conditions in which South African children attempt to gain an education gains momentum.
The Mail & Guardian reported earlier this year that litigation, advocacy and community mobilisation are the ERP’s chief strategies to compel the government to meet its constitutional obligations on the rights to basic education.
”State statistics are unreliable or non-existent in areas critical to basic education,” says Salim Vally, acting director of Wits University’s Education Policy Unit (EPU). ”And the state’s effectiveness in disseminating information about education rights is inadequate.”
Two weeks ago the ERP and the Anti-Privatisation Forum convened a workshop with representatives from Soweto, Orange Farm, East Rand, Johannesburg inner city, Alexandra, Vaal, Daveyton and Thembelihle. Observing the workshop, the M&G heard recurring concerns such as multiple problems with the state’s school-fees policy, long walking distances to schools, lack of transport subsidies and dubious admission procedures.
The long list of problems school-children experience daily includes inadequate feeding scheme programmes, lack of facilities, sexual harassment, costly school uniforms, electricity and water cut-offs and lack of schools.
”Legal literacy” is a massive problem concerning fees policy, says Faranaaz Veriava of Wits’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals).
”We’re getting more and more calls showing that parents have never heard of their rights.”
Parents can qualify for exemption in certain circumstances, and schools are legally obliged to inform parents about these. But the ERP is gathering mounting evidence of widespread abuses: illegal practices include learners being forbidden to write exams if fees are unpaid, being excluded from school until fees are collected, and being refused admission for next year without prepayment of fees.
The M&G has seen threatening letters sent to parents from debt collectors hired by schools in KwaZulu-Natal. These warn parents that non-payment will ”drastically affect [their] credit assessment on a national scale and [their] general integrity in other issues”. One letter is formally addressed to a parent by her first name only — her surname does not appear anywhere.
”We are investigating taking up cases against schools that hire debt collectors who unlawfully intimidate and pursue parents,” Veriava says.
”Some debt collectors hound parents over the phone.”
Transport problems are also widespread, says Brian Ramadiro of the Wits EPU. He has documented cases of children in the East Rand’s Rondebult area being ejected from school buses as recently as two weeks ago, with the exam period under way, for non-payments of fares.
The M&G has seen questionnaires the ERP workshop participants complete in their communities. One parent’s representative set of answers says her four children have been denied entry on to buses four times this year, resulting in absences from school ranging from three days to three weeks at a time. If her children cannot get to school by bus, ”one travels with a bicycle, the others stay at home”, the parent writes.
Ramadiro recently also investigated school conditions in the Eastern Cape areas of Cala, Elliot and Engcobo. He found one-room schools with no water, electricity or chalkboards.
After a usually barefoot walk of 10km to 14km, children mostly arrive at school without having had breakfast, and receive three to eight biscuits and a drink for lunch — when available. One school has been unable to supply even this meagre nutrition since June, he says.
With no public transport and no taxis, teachers themselves have to hitch rides to school. When it rains, most teachers and learners stay away from school.
ERP work in Limpopo and the Northern Cape has uncovered problems with farm schools, says Cals researcher Stuart Wilson. About 70% are still unprotected by signed agreements, required by law, between farmers and provincial education departments.
”The least-enlightened farmers have realised that the less cooperative they are, the more likely their farm school is to be amalgamated with another school,” Wilson says. ”The education department provides neither carrot nor stick to induce farmers to sign.”
One school he visited has no sanitation of any kind, is in unhealthy proximity to a ”foul-smelling rubbish dump”, and has been without running water since its electricity was cut off in September, Wilson says.
He reports a grade seven learner saying the school is ”depressing” and ”uncomfortable”, and the lack of basic equipment hampers the pace at which he learns.
”There is only one chalkboard for four grades,” the learner says.
Wilson also found a well-resourced school with a ”blatantly illegal admissions policy”: no child is admitted if he or she passes another school on the way from home. This is to eliminate ”trash” and ”undesirables”, the principal told Wilson, who comments that the practice is indirect discrimination by race.
Legal researchers, educationists, social activists and civil society representatives provide the ERP’s expertise in its four main focus areas: school fees, basic infrastructure, farm schools and sexual harassment of learners. Adult basic education and training, which specialists say has been disastrous for nearly a decade, has just been added as the ERP’s fifth focus area.
The ERP has joined forces with social movements such as the Anti-Privatisation Forum, and ongoing, countrywide workshops with community representatives, including teachers, parents and learners are a major data-gathering tool.
Participants describe their experiences, are informed about basic education rights (concerning fees, for example), and in turn conduct house-to- house research in their own communities on the problems hindering access to education.
”This participatory research process for the ERP tilts ownership of, and power relations in, the research towards communities,” Vally says.
Formally launched in September, the ERP is the first initiative of its kind worldwide, said keynote speaker Katarina Tomasevski, special rapporteur on education for the United Nations.
Tomasevski deplored recent UN and global shifts in thinking about basic education: instead of being seen as a human right, it is being reinterpreted as a ”development objective”. This is a ”lottery approach”, she said, because not everyone will be ”lucky enough” to enter the system; and merely making inroads into education inequalities is seen as ”developmental” progress.
By contrast, the ERP works from the premise that the South African Constitution creates ”a duty for the state to ensure full and immediate enjoyment of the right” to basic education, according to the ERP’s framework document.