The education department is proposing a restriction of school fees to less than R2 000 a year at public schools and if schools want to charge more the whole parent population must vote.
It also wants to compensate schools for fee exemptions.
These proposals are part of the department’s second review of its school-funding policy and are still under discussion.
The department recommends:
- Schools be funded on the basis of the fees they collect;
- All schools be given powers to run their own finances;
- Section 21 schools be given additional powers if they apply for “public benefit status”, but at least 10% of a school’s enrolment must be from underprivileged communities; and
- Paying schools financial rewards for outstanding improvements in learner performance.
The department says the sliding-scale subsidisation of schools on the basis of the categories of poverty they fall into should be replaced with subsidisation based on fee income received. It concedes that the current “quintile” system has “not worked as well as was originally hoped” and that problems are “unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future”.
This system has been dogged by controversy, with schools being wrongly classified or receiving their subsidies late and therefore experiencing cash flow problems.
Under the proposed new system schools charging higher fees will receive less government funding “for every rand of fee funding they collect”. 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 intends producing a table setting out subsidy allocations by learner for different amounts of average fees collected. It recommends that all schools automatically be given section 21 status, meaning they will have control of their finances. But to deal with “excessive” fees at these schools, “stringent voting procedures should apply”. It says that the majority of all parents (where parent votes correspond with the number of children in the school) should approve any fee that is more than R2 000. The R2 000 level would change over time in line with inflation.
Voting can take place through a ballot paper that is sent with the child to the school if the parent is unable to attend the meeting. To date, schools that exempt poor learners from paying fees are not compensated and the department recommends a new formula to partly compensate schools.
Meanwhile, section 21 schools may apply for “public benefit status” whereby they will receive less funding but will have the power to take 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 its learners must come from families that earn below the South African income median, which is R35 000 in annual gross earnings a household.
Conditional status can be granted if there is a plan to fill the quota within two years.
But they will not face fee restrictions as “it is assumed that parent involvement in such schools is adequate to bring about fees that a majority of parents truly want, using the normal voting procedures currently laid down in the South African Schools Act”.
One teacher unionist close to the process says: “Restrictions on school fee setting will erode the functions of school governing bodies, which should be strengthened. They are integral to school governance and should be allowed to debate school fees.”
He says the 10% quota of underprivileged children that wealthy schools will be obliged to accommodate is “negligible”. He suggests it be between 25% and 35%, which will bring transformation in particular to white Afrikaans schools that refuse to change.