In June, the Department of Education released its plan of action for improving access to free and quality basic education. In its earlier review of the financing, resourcing and costs of education in public schools, the department waxed lyrical about the so-called “right to pay school fees”. The shift in rhetoric is remarkable. The shift in policy is not so spectacular.
The department should take credit for finally acknowledging that the debate on public sector education resourcing must be rights-based. Section 29 (1) (a) of our Constitution gives everyone the right to a basic education. Unlike other socio-economic rights, this commitment is not limited by what the government can afford. Nor is the state permitted to realise the right incrementally. The state is required to take measures to deliver free and quality basic education without delay.
This means that if the resources currently available to the education department are inadequate to realise the right, the government must rearrange its total budget, borrow more or put up taxes to increase spending on education to adequate levels.
However, despite recognising the centrality of the right to basic education, the department is unwilling (or, more likely, unable, given that it does not have the discretion to set its own budget) to acknowledge these financial consequences.
For example, the plan says that a minimum package adequate to realise the right to basic education in respect of consumables like textbooks, stationery, electricity and water would cost somewhere between R600 and R1 000 a year for the average learner. Poorer learners from deprived communities will doubtless need more than this. But, the plan goes on to say, the state can only really afford R500 per average learner within its currently available resources.
The R500 norm, promptly implemented, will clearly benefit the poorest schools, which, as the plan acknowledges, receive far less than this at the moment. This should be welcomed. But the department’s approach nonetheless dilutes the government’s constitutional obligations.
If the higher sums required to help realise the right to basic education are not currently available, then the department’s budget must simply be increased. This directive is implicit in any meaningful interpretation of Section 29 (1) (a) of the Constitution. Instead, the plan says that even the “affordable” R500 average will only be available from next year, possibly the year after.
This reluctance to acknowledge the meaning of the right to a basic education is also evident in the plan’s proposals to reform the school fees regime.
The plan’s major objective is to “remove the need for the poorest schools to charge fees”. This is laudable. The department plans to prohibit the poorest 40% of schools from charging fees unless individual schools are granted special permission from their provincial departments. The poorest schools, the plan says, should not have to charge fees to buy essential equipment — at least not once the department has been able to provide them with adequate funding. Nor should they be charging school fees to pay for “non-essential inputs in schools”.
But, if both these claims are accepted, what should fees be used for? “Legitimate community-based projects,” the plan says. Logically, however, these projects must either be essential or non-essential. The plan says that parents should not be forced to pay for items that fall into either of these categories, so it is far from clear what criteria will be applied to assess whether or not schools should be permitted to charge fees. All this confusion indicates the malaise which must follow if the department wishes to maintain its paradoxical commitment to both free education and “the right to pay school fees”.
Nonetheless, the plan insists that “school communities exist where the charging of a small school fee, subject to strict exemptions criteria, is justified on the basis of particular community-based projects for improving the school”. Yet there are dozens of other education systems across the world in which school fees are not charged, but where school communities endure nonetheless.
Further, as the department acknowledged in the review, and again in the plan, the school fees policy actually facilitates the marginalisation of poor learners and parents.
The plan envisages a number of creditable measures to prevent this. But, if the school community is, as the plan supposes, held together by fee-paying parents, then won’t poorer parents — even if properly exempted from paying fees — still feel alienated?
The revamped school fees regime could also suffer from the “player-referee” problem implicit in allowing provincial departments to determine whether or not schools should charge fees. The provinces will be operating on tight budgets if the plan’s spending increases are to be met within existing resources. It is not unreasonable to suppose that cash-strapped provincial departments will be tempted to grant schools the right to charge school fees simply to relieve pressure on their resources.
For all these reasons, it is difficult to see what these rather vague and confusing proposals for changing the school fees system achieve. Why not just ban fees outright, but continue to allow school governing bodies to seek voluntary contributions? Parents will undoubtedly chip in what they can afford.
In any case, the plan gives no explicit justification for restricting these limited reforms to the poorest 40% of schools. The review demonstrated that there is no significant difference between fees charged in these schools and levels of fees charged in the next poorest 40% of schools. Nor, as the review also acknowledged, are non-fee-paying parents any less marginalised in these slightly richer schools. So why not ban fees for all but the richest 20%?
The reply implicit in the plan is that the state simply does not have the resources to do so. But this is no excuse. The Constitution requires that more money be made available.
Stuart Wilson is a research officer at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand