Free education in sharp focus

‘The time may have arrived for South Africa to offer all children free primary education in law. This would place us in step with modern democracies worldwide.”

Yes, Naledi Pandor really said this, in her budget speech in Parliament recently. Where did such a groundbreaking announcement come from?

Since 1994 the government has engaged in intricate manoeuvring and frequent sophistry to justify its refusal to abolish fees altogether. Education ministers have repeatedly argued that fee-paying is a privilege parents are reluctant to forego because it increases their sense of investment in their children’s education.

There is no evidence, however, to show that parents who do not pay fees feel less concern about where and how their children are educated.

To Pandor’s credit, she admitted in last year’s budget speech that ‘fees discourage school attendance at both primary and secondary schools”. She was explaining the necessity to introduce no-fee schools — the poorest 20% of schools last year, 40% this year.

This week, however, her focus was on what she called ‘reported failures in our execution of the [no-fee schools] policy”. In particular, she highlighted complaints from some no-fee schools that they now have less income than before.

‘It was never the intention to reduce income,” she said. ‘Rather, beneficiary schools should receive increased funding.”

Rather late in the day, but refreshingly, she also admitted another policy failure — in the 60% of state schools that still charge fees. She said they admit many poor pupils and exempt them from fees in accordance with government regulations, but receive no compensatory state finance. In other words, every exemption granted is school income lost.

Why she called this ‘a new challenge” is unclear, as many organisations have pinpointed this policy flaw over the years. And she also remained silent on other failures in the execution of funding policies — including schools given the wrong poverty ranking, illegal misapplications of fee-exemption procedures, and late transfer of funds from provinces to schools.

Her concession that it might be time to introduce free primary education was apparently within the context of policy and implementation failures. She referred to the ‘quintile-based policy” — the ranking of all public schools in five poverty-related categories — as ‘complex”. That is an understatement.

All school financing depends on the correct implementation of the quintile policy, a massive undertaking involving an intricate application of census data from Statistics South Africa.

Already underperforming provincial education departments — which still struggle to get textbooks and stationery to schools on time — have to perform the task, and repeat it every year.

There was evidence elsewhere in Pandor’s budget speech that she is amenable to the idea of free education, specifically her announcement of R600-million over three years for bursaries to study at further education and training colleges. These are bursaries, not the loans to be repaid which the National Student Financial Aid Scheme provides to about one-seventh of university students.

Generally plain-speaking, Pandor does sometimes play to the gallery. What has happened to her announcement last year that she was considering a new university policy that would place an upper limit on student fees? All she said this week was that ‘fee levels at many institutions continue to be prohibitive”.

Does her reference to free primary schooling contain the seed of one of the most significant of post-1994 education policy developments? Or was it just ministerial musing?

Budget 2007: the facts

Schools

Universities

FET colleges

Overall