Few of the schoolchildren whom the government’s policy on school fees is intended to benefit qualify for exemption in practice. And school funding policies that are supposed to redress apartheid-era inequities serve to privilege historically advantaged schools, perpetuating and widening the gulf between an elite few public schools and the large majority of under-resourced schools.
These are key findings of the Wits University Education Policy Unit’s (EPU) latest Quarterly Review of Education and Training in South Africa, published a month before the results of the government’s review of its school fees policy are expected. Subtitled Human Rights, Neoliberalism and Education, the edition situates problems in education policy and practice within deepening inequalities in the country’s social sector.
”There are some in official circles who promote the view that education and training or, more specifically, skills development, is a panacea for unemployment and poverty,” writes EPU acting director Salim Vally, the editor of this edition of the Quarterly Review.
”But the inability of the state to challenge and roll back the worst inequalities that continue to plague the education system must be seen as human rights violations.”
The government’s macroeconomic strategy, prioritising economic growth over redistribution, frames EPU researcher Kimberley Porteus’s analysis of education financing. The Department of Education’s 1998 Norms and Standards for School Funding provides for the exemption of school fees for low-income parents if the combined gross income of a learner’s parents is less than 10 times the annual fees per learner.
But problems have already begun to appear, Porteus observes.
”The policy assumes that school-based governing bodies have the capacity to determine parental income — a notoriously difficult and sensitive task in the context of the informal economy.”
The policy also ”assumes that parents living in protracted poverty will engage constructively with school authorities through a bureaucratic process of exemption, underestimating the alienation from bureaucratic processes and power associated with living in deep poverty”, Porteus argues.
She points out that the state does not provide compensation to schools when learners do receive exemption.
”While the data is yet to be analysed nationally, it appears that while the exemption policies are applied in formerly privileged schools (often alienating working-class parents), they are largely not applied in working-class schools where the majority of parents are unable to pay the school fees and yet do not apply for exemption.”
The trend appears to be that the lower the socio-economic status of a school community, the lower the school fees, the fewer who pay school fees, and ”the increased irrelevance of the exemption process”, Porteus says.
”There are already signs of growing tension between school administrators and parents, with school administrators threatening to sue parents for not paying fees.”
The policy itself is flawed, argue Vally and EPU researcher Brian Ramadiro. Even where school fees are very low, poor parents’ annual gross incomes are often too high to qualify for exemption. ”At the lower end of the schooling market, it would seem that no one would ever qualify for a school fees exemption.”
Given that schooling costs involve more than tuition fees — transport and uniforms are significant expenses, for example — the current fees policy ”undermines the spirit of the South African Schools Act [1996], which is to grant exemptions to those that need them most”. The narrowness of the policy ”partly explains why so few people have applied for school fees exemptions and why so few have been issued”.
Overall, school funding policies formulated in the late 1990s have ”privileged historically advantaged schools with reference to personnel spending”, argues Porteus. This is because certain curricular areas (such as technology and agriculture) receive preferential funding — yet these areas are offered primarily in advantaged schools. And teachers with higher qualifications, who are also predominantly in advantaged schools, are paid more.
Although government policy is to direct greater resources to poorer schools, ”in practice the actual budget redistributed … is minimal”, representing on average 7,8% of provincial education departments’ budgets, ”with poorer provinces distributing the lowest levels … Even after the planned redistribution of public funds to schools has been completed, poor schools can still expect to have less than half the budget of a more advantaged school.”
Taking Gauteng, the country’s wealthiest province, as her example, Porteus also shows that schools in the three lowest economic brackets receive less state per capita expenditure than schools in the two highest brackets. And schools in the three lowest brackets ”demonstrate significantly higher learner:educator ratios”, she says.