The government is moving to cap fees at public schools at R2 000 a year and to compensate schools that grant fee exemptions.
These proposals are part of the Department of Education’s review of school funding policies and are expected to be put before provincial education ministers this weekend.
The department’s confidential draft review, which the Mail & Guardian has seen, says that the current system of funding schools has ”not worked as well as was originally hoped” and its problems are ”unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future”.
Schools are subsidised according to a sliding scale based on the categories of poverty into which they fall. The draft review says this system should be replaced with subsidisation based on income derived from fees — the lower a school’s fees, the higher its state allocation.
The current system has been dogged by controversy: schools have been placed in the wrong poverty categories and have received subsidies late, often experiencing cash-flow problems.
The department recommends:
- Schools be funded on the basis of the fees they collect;
- All schools be given powers to run their own finances; and
- Schools be rewarded financially for outstanding improvements in learner performance.
Schools charging higher fees will receive less government funding ”for every rand of fee funding they collected”. The department says there ”will inevitably be schools that, under the new system, will either have to lower their fees, or accept that their school allocation will be lower than it was in the past”.
It recommends that all schools be given section 21 status, meaning that they will control their own finances. But, to deal with ”excessive” fees at these schools, ”stringent voting procedures should apply”. It says that the majority of parents (where parent votes correspond to the number of children in the school) should approve any fee that is higher than R2 000, but schools that have a ”no-fee” status will remain.
Meanwhile, current section 21 schools, which tend to be better resourced, may apply for ”public benefit status” whereby they will receive less funding but will have the power to take out a bank loan up to a certain limit and use government funds to manage building projects.
But they have to meet two criteria: learner performance has to be consistently high and at least 10% of their learners must come from families that earn below the South African income median of R35 000 in annual gross earnings a household.
These schools will not face fee capping as ”it is assumed that parent involvement in such schools is adequate to bring about fees that the majority of parents truly want, using the normal voting procedures laid down in the South African Schools Act”, the draft document says.
The department also recommends a new formula that partly compensates schools that grant fee exemptions. Schools that exempt poor learners from paying fees are not compensated.
The draft document has been circulated to teacher unions, school governing bodies and education experts for their input.
Some of them told the M&G that they are opposed to capping fees because it could result in parents moving their children to private schools.
One teacher unionist close to the process said that the 10% quota of underprivileged children that wealthy schools will be obliged to accommodate is ”negligible” and that it should be between 25% and 35% to accelerate transformation.