Despite the Cabinet’s recent endorsement of a comprehensive action plan on school financing, key stakeholders say the plan’s pro-poor measures are inadequate.
”The plan is a step in the right direction,” says John Lewis, research officer at the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu).
But its almost exclusive focus on a mere 10% of the education budget means the plan amounts to ”fiddling around with redress at the margins”.
The action plan is the product of the government’s review of school education costs, which Minister of Education Kader Asmal released in March.
”Sixty percent or more of our learners will have access to a free quality basic education when the plan is fully implemented,” Asmal announced in June.
The Department of Education intends to start implementation ”at least by 2005”, acting deputy director general Firoz Patel told the Mail & Guardian. ”But there is a fervent hope that we can find the money, and the space in our budgets, to start next year.”
Asmal also announced that learners with similar levels of poverty will receive the same minimum level of school funding regardless of the province in which they are located. And a national norm of R450 (in 2003 terms) will be allocated per learner for ”non-personnel recurrent items” such as textbooks, stationery, water, electricity, maintenance of facilities and teaching equipment. This is double the current expenditure, Asmal said.
There will be automatic exemption from fees for learners who qualify for certain social service grants; the fees exemption process will be ”strengthened” and fewer ”poor schools” will continue to charge fees ”to fund their perceived quality choices”.
Sadtu welcomes the plan’s national minimum basic package and its national (rather than provincial) poverty targeting. But fees should be dropped for a much larger proportion of learners, Lewis says.
”Those who can pay should continue to do so — but that shouldn’t exacerbate existing inequalities. Resources should be consciously redirected to the poor.”
The plan fails to address one of Sadtu’s most serious objections, Lewis says. The finance review that has given birth to the action plan was ”largely silent” on personnel expenditure, which accounts for 90% of the education budget. Sadtu commented at the time that in this respect the review was ”downright misleading”.
The government has approached school financing problems ”from the wrong end”, says Stuart Wilson, a researcher at Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals). The plan of action is based on the education department’s current resources and funds. Research has been conducted within these limits, rather than determining first how much funding the system requires to realise the constitutional right to basic education for all learners.
”The right to basic education is a strong positive right and should not be limited by the department’s current resources,” Wilson says. ”The plan of action is incrementally progressive, but the approach is too incremental to comply with the government’s constitutional obligations, in our view.”
Cals is also concerned that adult basic education and training (Abet) gets only ”five lines” in the plan. ”Three years after the Abet Act was passed, the department has still not finalised funding norms and mentions that this will happen only in 2004,” says Phillip Trotter, a visiting researcher at Cals.
The Education Rights Project (ERP), based at Wits University’s education policy unit, and the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) say in a detailed written analysis that there is a fundamental contradiction in government policy. The government purports to promote ”basic education and … equal access to educational institutions”, but ”consciously continues to push the responsibility for getting an education onto households and the private sector”.
The fundamental issue of the right to a free basic education, which the Constitution guarantees as an immediate (not progressive) right, is not addressed, the APF and the ERP argue. Rather, there is a contradiction between the commitment to pro-poor redress and the government’s overriding growth, employment and redistribution strategy.
The APF and the ERP argue that the country’s taxation system can be used to fund free basic education. They say this would do away with the need for any exemptions process, merely strengthening which will not solve well-documented problems of implementation.
The mass action in Soweto on June 16 was one indication that the battle for education rights is set to continue, says ERP representative Salim Vally. About 5 000 people attended the march.
The overwhelming majority were young people from schools in the area, which have a strong historical link to the original uprising. The march began at Morris Isaacson School — the starting point on June 16 1976.