Outdated and dysfunctional government policy on transport subsidies for schoolchildren has emerged as another factor plaguing the attempts of poor families to ensure education for their children.
Inadequate subsidies join school fees and a host of other education-related expenses that deny the country’s poorest children their right to basic education.
This is highlighted in recent research the Education Rights Project (ERP) has conducted in the East Rand community of Rondebult and the Sol Plaatje extension of the informal settlement known as Durban Roodepoort Deep (DRD). In both cases, relocations of whole communities have left learners without nearby schools, so state-subsidised transport has become a critical factor affecting access to education.
Based in Wits University’s Education Policy Unit and Centre for Applied Legal Studies, the ERP has for a year been conducting nationwide research with communities to assist them to ”articulate their concerns and the challenges they are faced with in attempting to provide education for their children”, says Ramadiro.
Rondebult is a township established in 1998 under the Reconstruction and Development Programme for people who formerly occupied the squatter settlements in and around Katlehong. The Sol Plaatje extension of DRD resulted last year from a court order that evicted about 3 000 families from an informal settlement in Diepkloof, Soweto, to Durban Deep, an abandoned mine near Roodepoort, north of Johannesburg.
For children who have to travel more than 5km to get to school, the state provides 13c per kilometre per child. But this policy has been unrevised since 1997, says ERP member Brian Ramadiro, a researcher at Wits University’s Education Policy Unit. Parents have to top up the state subsidy to meet the bus company charges, which leaves them unable to cope with regular fare increases.
This year the fares have increased again, the ERP has found.
Transport costs alone in this area amount to six times those of school fees, Ramadiro says. Children in 40 households the ERP surveyed last year were spending an average of two-and-a-half months of the school year at home — and some up to seven months.
In DRD the ERP found that prohibitive transport costs prevent about one-quarter of children of schoolgoing age from attending school. This finding emerges from the ERP’s analysis of ”access costs”, says ERP member Stuart Wilson, a researcher at Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies.
This is ”money actually spent on school fees, school uniforms, transport expenses, textbooks and ‘pocket money’, given to children to buy food at school”.
A key finding of the investigation is the difference between households that pay transport fees and those that don’t, either because children walk to school or because they do not attend at all. Those that don’t pay spend 17,2% of their monthly income on school-related costs for each schoolgoing child, while for those that do the proportion soars to nearly 40%. As in Rondebult, nearly half of school-access costs are for transport alone.
The ERP concludes that the Rondebult community needs full exemption from school fees, full subsidies for other education costs — such as uniforms, transport, textbooks and stationery — and, ”as a matter or urgency”, construction of a primary school.
In DRD ”the primary need articulated by residents is access to free transport”, Wilson says, ”and this appears to be a legitimate demand”.
The ERP does not intend to generalise the results of its research beyond the group of affected parents in these two communities, Ramadiro says. But ”the preliminary results of this study are consistent with other studies that examine a link between low household income and poor school attendance”.
The government last year announced a review of its education financing policies, the results of which are expected shortly. This will include reconsidering not only fees but transport subsidies as well, says Bobby Soobrayan, deputy director general (planning and monitoring) in the national Department of Education.
”While the extent of empirical data is limited, we are sampling nationwide to ascertain what percentage of learners have to travel more than 5km to school. But this won’t tell us how many of these are choosing to do so. We do want to look at how the poor are affected — that is, to disaggregate the figures according to poverty levels.”