The government this week successfully fended off a court challenge to school fees regulations intended to protect poor pupils and their parents. Seventeen well-funded public schools in KwaZulu-Natal brought an urgent application in the Pietermaritzburg High Court last Friday to halt implementation of the government’s new regulations on exemptions from payment of school fees. The new regulations were published in the Government Gazette last month, and are to be implemented next year. On Wednesday, Judge Phillip Levinsohn upheld the government’s policy; reasons for the judgement are still to come.
Since 1998, government policy on school fees has been that the inability to pay should never prevent a child from attending a public school. The policy states that parents with a gross annual income of less than 10 times the annual school fees are automatically exempted from paying fees; if annual income is between 10 and 30 times the fees, pupils qualify for partial exemption.
However, the Department of Education’s 2003 review of the costs of schooling found that the system was widely abused. Schools were either failing to inform parents of their right to apply for exemption or illegally charging “registration” fees — hitting poorer pupils hardest.
The department’s new regulations tighten the way exemptions are implemented. One instrument through which the new regulations intend to achieve this is by applying a sliding scale for partial exemptions. This fixes the percentages of fees parents must pay according to precisely how their incomes compare with fees.
The 17 schools argued that this would force them to adopt entirely new budgetary processes, claiming that their income from fees would be substantially reduced. They argued that the old regulations had given schools more discretion over the number and extent of partial exemptions they could grant; and that because the new regulations were gazetted only in October there was inadequate time for them to draw up new budgets for next year.
But the government argued that the new regulations had been known and available for comment since 2004, and that the schools’ papers “are silent with regard to the steps which have been taken by any [of the schools] to implement the regulations. If such steps have not been taken, then there has simply been a deliberate decision to flout the obligations placed by the 2006 regulations on the schools.”
The government also argued that since 1998 “all schools ought to have been applying a sliding scale of exemptions”, and that schools that did not do so “simply disregarded the essence of the regulatory framework”, the purpose of which is to protect the most financially vulnerable.
“My sense is that schools have been looking for ways to get out of granting exemptions,” said advocate Faranaaz Veriava of Wits University’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies, “now that the government is taking a stronger pro-poor stand.”
Frans Lombard, the attorney for the schools, said he could not comment until he had seen the judge’s reasons.