CENTRE FOR EDUCATION POLICY DEVELOPMENT
Presentation to Parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee on Education by John Pampallis, Director, CEPD 1-2 June 2004

Introduction

On behalf of the CEPD, I would like to thank the members of this committee for giving us the opportunity to make this presentation here.

The past decade has seen considerable achievements in many areas of the South African education system, including, inter alia, the following: apartheid's ethnically and racially based education departments have been abolished and have been replaced by a single national and nine provincial education departments; the old school curriculum has been phased out and a new, more progressive one is in the process of being phased in; the culture of learning and teaching in schools has improved; new quality assurance and quality management systems have been introduced at general, further and higher education levels and laid the basis for further improving the quality of learning and teaching; the racial integration of learners in formerly racially exclusive, relatively privileged schools has, with a few notable exceptions, been relatively trouble-free and has provided opportunities for a growing number of black children; new, more democratic governance systems have been established in our educational institutions - even if they are not all operating optimally; the restructuring of further and higher education institutions is now underway in accordance with clear plans and a great deal of work is being done to make their curricula more appropriate.

It is important to recognize and to take encouragement from these achievements. They are a clear indication that considerable progress can be made when we put our minds to it. Nonetheless it is important also to recognize that we have not succeeded yet in all our objectives, including some of our most fundamental ones. In this submission we would like to focus on one area in which we are facing major challenges: the right to basic education and the question of free and compulsory education. This is obviously not the only area where we have not met our objectives, but our work has led us to believe that it is among the most crucial challenges which we must tackle successfully if our democracy is to meet its most basic objectives in the area of education.

The question of free and compulsory schooling

The demand for free and compulsory education for all has been a basic democratic demand in South Africa for over half a century. As early as 1943, this demand was voiced by the African National Congress (ANC, 1943:219-220) as well as others in the broad liberation movement (AH African Convention and National Anti-CAD, 1943:356). In 1955, the Congress of the People adopted this demand in the Freedom Charter which stated that: Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children. This call was made repeatedly by all sections of the liberation movement from then on - and particularly from the time of the 1976 student uprisings and throughout the struggles led by the National Education Coordination Committee in the eighties and early nineties. Our current Constitution (Section 29) gives all South Africans the right to basic education, including adult basic education.

Schooling today is compulsory for all children and considerable strides have been made towards universal access. However it is not free nor, as we all know, is it anywhere near being equal for all children. And those who suffer the most from the inequalities, are still those whose under-privilege derives from historical conditions of oppression - especially blacks and particularly those in rural areas of the former homelands. This is a great disappointment to all democrats who try to appraise our educational achievements objectively. Some have even suggested that it could be the result of the government selling out its constituency and adopting neo-liberal policies aimed at creating a larger role for the market in the provision of basic services. This perception, I believe, is incorrect.

I followed very closely the formation of policy leading to the passage of the South African Schools Act through this committee and its adoption by Parliament. As a member of the Hunter Committee and a researcher at the Education Policy Unit at the University of Natal, I was a participant in the debates on the reform of school organization, governance and funding and made a submission to this portfolio committee on the SA Schools Bill. Since then I have done research and written a number of articles on these issues. My understanding at the time, and I am sure that it will be borne out by those of you who were members of this committee in 1996, was that the committee actually believed that it was providing for free and compulsory education for the poorest schools, parents and communities.

Although the Act allows schools to charge fees, it states that these fees must be approved by the majority at an annual meeting of parents. It also provides for fee exemptions for parents who are not able to pay the fees established by the majority and even gives the right to parents to appeal to the Head of the provincial Department of Education if they are dissatisfied with a governing body's decision with regard to an exemption application. An argument that was made to the Hunter Committee by the Treasury and that was also made on numerous occasions in arguments before the portfolio committee and elsewhere, was that it was necessary to allow wealthier communities to charge fees as this would release state resources. There was never a suggestion that schools in poor communities would need to charge fees in order to discharge their basic obligations as educational institutions. Indeed, Section 34 of the Schools Act stated that: 'The stale (my emphasis) must fund public schools from public revenue on an equitable basis in order to ensure the proper exercise of the rights of learners to education and the redress of past inequalities in education provision.'

I doubt if anyone in this committee in 1996 suspected that schools would be so short of resources that they would feel compelled to charge fees to people who survived on social welfare grants and even to put tremendous pressure on parents and children to pay fees of as little as fifty or one hundred rand a year'. In fact this is what has happened - often because poor parents do not understand the law, because governing bodies in poorer schools are often dominated by school principals and teachers and above all because the schools do not get enough state funding to cover their basic needs such as chalk, stationery, repairs, electricity and cleaning materials.

While there is no widespread evidence that the need to pay fees is keeping children out of school on a mass scale, there are many documented cases - especially in rural areas - of children dropping out of school because they are unable to pay their fees. There is also ample evidence that the fees are causing huge stress among disadvantaged communities which have to pay them - or causing stress to schools who cannot get the money from parents who are simply too poor to pay. I remember one incident at the 'HIV/ AIDS and Education Conference' that the previous Minister of Education organized in 2002. Some children who had been affected came to speak to the audience at the opening ceremony. One little boy from Limpopo Province (ten years old, if I remember correctly) told us that his parents were both dead and that he had to look after other people's cattle to earn enough to pay his school fees. To hear this story in the opulence of Gallagher Estate, in the middle of a sumptuous three course meal, really brought home the distressing situation that we have landed ourselves in and which we need to deal with.

There has obviously been a disjuncture between our policy intentions and the policy outcomes for reasons which are not clear. Possible reasons include: insufficiently careful planning and budgeting in moving from policy to implementation; insufficient priority being given in the implementation process to bridging inequities and ensuring that schooling is affordable to all; insufficient attention being paid by all of us (Parliament, officials, researcher and NGOs) to the situation on the ground.

So what needs to be done to remedy the situation? It is a common assumption in many circles in SA - including government circles - is that the current inequalities in the school system are somehow temporary and that they will be (or at least could be) countered over time by a gradual increase in state funding for the poorer schools. An American researcher, Daria Roithmayr (2004), raises the possibility - even the probability - that this will not happen: not necessarily because it was designed this way, but because the system of school fees has locked inequalities into the structure of our system. Those who can afford to pay higher school fees benefit from a better quality education and the system of exemptions does not really work. Government cannot change the system, Roithmayr says, without, forfeiting the private funding that fees provide to the public education system. If it wanted to do this but not forfeit the quality of education provided at the formerly white schools, it would need to fund all students at the level of historically white schools; such an exercise would have cost the government an additional 3.5% of GNP had it been carried out in 1996 (and presumably something similar now)2. These costs, she says, are unacceptable to government - and I suspect that she is right, especially at the present time.

One may find Roithmayr's views rather too pessimistic and feel that she underestimates South of Africa's determination to tackle these problems vigorously. But, one must admit that there is some merit in the argument and that it maps out one possible scenario. Given the centrality of the demand for free and compulsory education in the aims of the South African liberation movement and the aspirations of most of our people over the past century, this matter needs to be given serious attention.

The national Department of Education has already begun to do this with its Review of the Financing, Resourcing and Costs of Education in Public Schools, published in early 2003 (DOE, 2003 a) and the follow-up Plan of Action (DOE, 2003b) that aimed at ameliorating the conditions of the poorest learners and their parents. This included a proposal to the effect that schools in the two lowest quintiles (as set out in the School Funding Norms (DOE, 1998)) would be obliged to seek Departmental approval for the charging of school fees and that additional state funding should ‘ensure that no poor school should need to charge school fees owing to inadequate public funding' (DOE, 2003b).

This is really the minimum that needs to happen if we are not to continue making education a serious financial burden for our poorest communities. But it has not happened in 2004 as proposed in the Plan, whether because the Treasury has not been forthcoming with the necessary finance or for some other reason, we don’t know. Although the former Minister of Education, as recently as the election campaign, was saying that it was his intention to follow this course of action, we heard nothing about it in the government's budget or in the President's State of the Nation address where other poverty alleviation measures were dealt with. We hope that both the current Minister and this legislature continue to pursue the DOE's plan to rid poor parents of the need to pay school fees and also to rid schools of the need to charge them.

Other initiatives to ameliorate the conditions of the poor were also proposed in the DOE's Plan of Action. These include: policies to restrict the costs of school uniforms, scholar transport and textbooks; an expansion and reorganization of the primary school nutrition programme; adjustments to the provisioning norms for both educators and non-educators and for capital investment in school infrastructure. While all these measures will not bring about equality in our school system they will at least help to overcome the worst forms of inequity in our current system and lay the basis for further moves towards a just schooling system.

Both the school fee issue and these other measures need to be given priority and treated with a sense of urgency. We doubt that they will be enough and I suspect that the introduction of a no-fee policy for the two lowest quintiles will soon be followed by demands to extend it to at least the third quintile. Youth and student organizations whose members (and their parents) are facing the strain of having to pay fees, are already campaigning for an end to all school fees and a far more accommodating system of financial aid to students in further and higher education. In this they join the Global Campaign for Education - SA, a coalition of teacher unions, student organizations, governing body federations, and NGOs - which has also been campaigning for free education since 2000. For government it is now important to make a start by tackling the conditions of its poorest citizens along the lines already suggested by the two DOE documents mentioned above. This will show the country that government is serious about free and compulsory education - at least for those citizens who cannot afford it - and will lay the basis for further measures as they become affordable to the state.

A word on basic adult education

As noted above, the Constitution (in the Bill of Rights) gives all South Africans the right to basic education, including adult basic education (Section 29 (1)). It also gives them the right to further education, although it implicitly acknowledges that the state's resources are not immediately sufficient to do this: the state, it declares, must make further education progressively available and accessible. The right to basic education, though, is an unqualified right and adults have as much right to it as children. This constitutional right for adults - millions of whom are functionally illiterate - has been blatantly ignored in practice by the education departments. And the rest of us have been equally guilty in our complicity by not raising the alarm about the neglect of adult basic education and training (ABET).

The South African National Literacy Initiative (SANLI) was established inside the Department of Education to promote the spread of adult literacy, partially through the establishment of partnerships. The largest adult literacy initiative in the country over the last two years has been the SANLI-UNISA initiative which, during the course last year (2003), had approx 270 000 adult learners and gave them a seven month literacy course (with classes 3 times a week) at an average cost of R270/learner?. The University of South Africa (UNISA) Adult Education Unit does this (with very little help from the Department of Education) through the use of a small core staff and a large number of volunteers. NGOs do similar work with smaller numbers of learners. While the use of part-time volunteers with rudimentary training is a less-than-adequate response to the challenges facing adult education in the long term, it does at least provide a solution to the lack of basic literacy which afflicts so many of our people.

The SANLI-UNISA programme, however, suffers from a major weakness: it has been almost entirely funded by external funding, especially the British Department for International Development (DfiD). This funding has now ceased as Britain has changed its international priorities and the programme is in danger of losing momentum before other funding is found - or closing down if it is not. Surely the state needs to take responsibility for this and to allocate it a substantial amount from its budget which could then be supplemented by external sources. The idea of using an outside, non-profit agency like UNISA (and there could possibly be others) is an innovative arrangement which allows for greater flexibility and lowers the cost of provision. But the state, and particularly the Department of Education, should not just rely on the generosity of foreign funders for the provision of such a basic service.

Adult basic education courses offered through the public adult learning centres by the provincial departments of education are also woefully inadequate. In Gauteng, for example, the latest annual report puts the number of learners in public adult basic education institutions at less than 60 000 (GDE, 2003:22). In all provinces adult basic education is under-resourced, has weak administrative and management support, poor infrastructure, inadequate staff (mainly part-time educators most of whom are not trained as adult educators), and insufficient learning support materials. The situation is worse in rural areas than in urban.(Baatjes, 2003).

ABET (and especially literacy training) is an important political, developmental and humanitarian objective for a democratic SA and the state needs to be centrally involved in meeting the demands. The deprivation of the right to literacy is a major denial of human rights Lack of functional literacy is not only a hardship in its own right, but in today's economy it is often a one-way ticket to unemployment and poverty. The persistence of large scale illiteracy in SA is an indictment of our democratic state, the departments of education whose responsibility it is to tackle it and all those of us whose responsibility it is to expose and raise these issues in the arena of public debate.


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