Faced with mounting civic pressure to relieve the burden of school fees, government moved last week to increase both access to schools and redress of gross apartheid racial inequalities in education provision.
But the leading trade union in the sector — the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) — said the proposals needed to go much deeper to make a significant impact.
The main proposals are that fees be scrapped at the poorest schools; and that certain children (for example, those receiving social grants) be automatically exempted from fees. The proposals were presented on Tuesday to Parliament’s portfolio committee on education.
Where the poorest schools (30% of all schools) now receive between R400 and R600 per learner, the department proposes they receive R703 per learner. This increase is balanced by reductions in what better-off schools will get: the richest 5% will get R117. The department promised ”stronger imperatives around the [education department’s] monitoring of fee exemptions”.
”[The] scale of implementation is far too small and the pace is painfully slow,” Sadtu president Willie Madisha said. Last year the then education minister, Kader Asmal, commissioned a Department of Education study on school funding. Abuses of the government’s fee-exemption policy and crippling transport costs were among the factors effectively excluding many children.
Schools, required by law to inform parents of the terms on which they could apply for exemption, had no incentive to do so because they received no compensation from the government for any exemptions they granted. In effect, some poor schools became even poorer, and some children of poor households continued to be denied an education.
Asmal’s commissioned report confirmed these findings, and led to last year’s education department ”plan of action”.
Sadtu — the largest teacher union, with about 220 000 members — said that the action plan promised that the poorest 40% of schools would be freed from fees, and hinted that this would be extended to the poorest 60% at some future stage.
”We had hoped that the changes would be implemented in 2004. This did not happen and we were then promised that implementation would take place in 2005. [Tuesday’s] announcement means a further delay … but with no specific number of schools targeted. That represents a heavy blow to the country’s poorest schools.”
The department also proposed an interim arrangement for next year that will involve the selection of some schools to be ”no fee” schools; financial compensation for them is ”under consideration”, said the department.
But Sadtu believes only 10% of the poorest schools will be targeted in this way next year. And because the proposals for 2006 refer only to non-personnel and non-capital spending, they account for less than 10% of the education budget. Personnel expenditure accounts for about 85% of spending.
While broadly welcoming some of the proposals, the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) said a ”real concern” is administrative capacity. Naptosa president Dave Balt told the Mail & Guardian ”there is a serious bottleneck between districts and schools when it comes to distribution of resources such as finances and textbooks.
”And now that dysfunctional system will be under extra pressure” in having to: identify which schools will be freed from charging fees; determine annually what each school should receive; and monitor fee exemptions.
The whole funding formula must be changed, Faranaaz Veriava, a legal researcher at Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals), told the M&G. ”There is still no provision for compensation to schools, and the poor will still have to go through the problematic exemption process.”
Veriava cited studies showing that fees are not the major or only obstacles for poor households: for some, 60% of income goes on transport to schools.