Flagrant violations of the government’s school admissions policy continued to plague parents and their children this week as schools in five provinces opened, according to education bodies now monitoring the admissions process.
Central to the problems is that government efforts to communicate education rights remain ineffective, leaving parents and learners vulnerable to school principals and governing bodies that abuse these rights, says the Education Rights Project (ERP), based at Wits University’s Education Policy Unit and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals).
Although data on how widespread the abuses of admissions policy are remains elusive, the exclusion of learners on questionable and often outrightly illegal grounds is a ”nationwide phenomenon”, says Congress of South African Students (Cosas) president general Julius Malema.
”You will find these problems in all poor communities,” he says. And government policy needs to acknowledge that ”the majority of people seeking admission to school are poor”, says South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) media officer Hassan Lorgat.
Based on increasing anecdotal evidence, the ERP and Sadtu this week backed Cosas’s view of the extent of the violations. Gauteng, Mpumalanga, North West, Northern Province and Free State opened school doors this week; the other four provinces will do so next week.
Illegal practices include learners being refused registration at schools because they have school fees outstanding from last year. Accounts pouring in to Cosas, the ERP and Sadtu also suggest that many schools are insisting upon a registration fee before confirming a learner’s admission. And some schools have been withholding report cards from last year, and so refusing admission, until outstanding fees are paid.
The ERP has extensive data showing that school principals fail to meet their legal obligation to inform parents and learners of their rights regarding exemption from payment of fees.
But, while some principals and school governing bodies do perpetrate ”illegal and wilful violations” of government policy, says the ERP’s Salim Vally, they are often in a financial vice: schools that provide exemptions from fees receive no compensation at all for doing do.
”Schools are therefore hard-pressed to collect as much revenue as possible,” Vally says. ”The lack of compensation to schools for granting exemptions is a major government policy flaw. It’s a complete disincentive for schools to inform parents of their rights.”
The government last year announced a review of its fees policy, the results of which are expected at the end of the month.
Media reports this week suggest large numbers of learners are being turned away from schools that say they are full. The ERP says this, too, results from inadequate government communication of education rights: many people do not know that they can begin registering their children at schools three months before the school year opens.
While some parents do this, teacher quotas then get finalised on the basis of these initial, and clearly partial, numbers of registrations. This leads to the annual frustrations of long queues for registration, learners lacking necessary documents such as birth certificates (undocumented migrants are especially vulnerable here) and multiple refusals of admission in the week teaching is supposed to commence.
Overall, ”the national and provincial education departments have done very little in educating parents and learners about their rights”, says the latest edition of the Quarterly Review of Education and Training in South Africa, published by Wits University’s Education Policy Unit.
The national Department of Education’s A Public School Policy Guide is frequently misleading, confusing and equivocal, says Cals researcher and ERP member Stuart Wilson in the review.
On school fees, the pamphlet is ”particularly problematic”: it creates the impression that only when a learner receives exemption from fees are schools forbidden to refuse admission or withhold exam results for non-payment.
But the government’s Norms and Standards for School Funding states that ”no learner can be denied admission or otherwise discriminated against, on grounds of the parent’s inability or failure to pay fees”.
”This implies,” Wilson says, ”that, even if a parent is not exempted from paying fees, the school is not entitled to withhold reports, exclude a child from any school activity, [or] withhold any school facilities simply because a parent has not paid fees. This would appear to be so even if a parent is withholding fees, which … they can actually afford to hand over.”
Sadtu’s Lorgat says there is a ”pressing need for clearer guidelines to schools and teachers from the government on what they can and can’t do regarding admissions and exclusions”.