Public schools face biggest reforms since 1994

The biggest reforms to public schools since 1994 quietly came into existence in the past month.

The Western Cape and Gauteng have made legislative changes that their provincial MECs hope will significantly change the access of poor children to quality education. In the Western Cape, changes to the governance model of schools will bring private money into poor schools. In Gauteng, changes to admission policy will bring more poor children into wealthy schools.

The approaches are opposite methods to achieve the same objective: how to narrow the gap between rich and poor schools and provide quality education to poor children whose birthplace would otherwise lock them into inferior education and poor life opportunities.

Gauteng MEC for education Panyaza Lesufi says: “Nobody must be denied access to quality education because they are born in the wrong area.”

We want to get more resources into poor schools, better educational outcomes and be open to deviation in traditional curriculum delivery.

—  Education MEC Debbie Schafer

Lesufi has had some bruising fights against schools and parents in the courts and lost. In July he lost a bid to force Hoërskool Overvaal — an Afrikaans high school — to take on learners from neighbouring areas who wanted to learn in English. The court ruled that Lesufi had not convincingly made the case for the learners to be admitted as there was still space in schools nearby where English instruction took place.

Less than six months later Lesufi gazetted his new admissions policy, which, he says, will prevent schools from hiding behind language policy in a bid to keep the poor out. “We knew it was a hollow victory,” he says.

Bringing poor kids into rich schools is also about building social cohesion in SA’s racially divided schools and suburbs.

“To deal with social cohesion let our children study together, play together. We can’t have a school that excludes people from a township which is close by because of the language of instruction. Our feeder-zone policy will allow parents that have been marginalised to get access to education for their kids,” he says.

The policy states that schools must use five principles to allocate places: the available curriculum; the gender of the school; whether siblings are already present at the school; distance from the school; and representivity.

It also outlaws any financial barrier to entry, such as administrative fees or deposits, and the screening of parents to check their credit history. Schools are already prohibited from excluding children on the basis of the ability to pay, and poor families may not be charged fees that exceed a certain level of their income. To ensure that the poor are not shut out, the feeder zones are large — a 30km radius around the school.

But the more poor pupils a school takes in, the greater the financial burden on it and other parents. Middle-class public schools are funded at a far lower level than poor ones. While the department pays for a set number of teachers and the building, it pays the wealthiest schools only R228 per pupil against the R1,777 (in Gauteng) and R1,316 (in the Western Cape) that poor schools get. This money must be used for everything from maintenance to office costs and additional activities.

The result has been that as middle-class schools take on increasing numbers of nonpaying pupils, facilities deteriorate and those who can pay abandon the public sector for private schools.

Lesufi regards this as an inevitable trade-off against the imperatives of breaking down apartheid barriers and breaking the resistance of the rich to make space for the poor. To counter the trend to some extent he has made efforts to stem the migration out of the township by building new schools — 44 out of a planned 60 have been completed since 2014 — and upgrading unsuitable ones through a public-private partnership. Through a R8.5bn turnkey project with private developers the province will build, upgrade and maintain 211 schools after which they will be handed over.

In its reforms the Western Cape has been at pains to keep the middle class in the public system. Middle-class parents bring money — through additional fees, which can be substantial — and other resources into schools. To close the gap between rich and poor, it wants to put private money into poor schools, using a new model that it has borrowed from the UK called collaboration schools.

Education MEC Debbie Schafer says that the collaboration model will enable private donors who want to uplift poor public schools to come in and exert accountability over the funding they provide.

To enable this, Schafer has passed legislation that will change the governance model of schools. At the moment, public schools are governed by school governing bodies, which the Schools Act says must be constituted of a majority of parents. The collaboration school will be a 50-50 model between the external operating partner, on the one hand, and parents and teachers on the other. The operating partner will be appointed jointly by the education department and the funder.

Among the funders are long-standing supporters of education the Dell Foundation, the Millennium Trust and the DG Murray Trust.

The change is controversial because it discards the philosophy underpinning public schools since 1994, which is that parents, and therefore communities, exercise oversight over government.

“We want to get more resources into poor schools, better educational outcomes and be open to deviation in traditional curriculum delivery,” says Schafer. She argues that the governance change had to be made to give funders leverage over the money they put in.

“Who would give a large amount of money to a government department? Donors want accountability,” she says.

The model follows that of the academy schools in the UK and has been piloted in the Western Cape for two years. Results have been pleasing, says Schafer, with annual national assessment test results in one primary school rising from 13% to 35% for grade 3 literacy and 29% to 53% for maths.

The operating partner will have the discretion on how to bring additional teaching resources into the school and some flexibility in deciding how to deliver the curriculum.

Accompanying the governance reforms are other measures to improve oversight over public schools. A major point of contention over the past decade with teacher trade unions has been the ability of departmental authorities to inspect schools and observe teaching. A limited form of “inspection” is now allowed, but two weeks' notice must be given to schools, which choose which teachers and which lessons to showcase.

Now, despite union opposition, Schafer is going ahead with setting up the Western Cape School Evaluation Authority.

“We are saying we will give schools two days' notice, we will observe every teacher, interview parents and interview pupils. The reports compiled by the authority will be posted on our website. The authority will report to the MEC and not to the department to make it more independent.”

The biggest objection of unions has been that evaluation of teachers cannot be fair when the social context in which they teach is so different.

“We say that is not an excuse for bad teaching. You can have a well-run school in a poor area,” she says.

The SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) says it believes that Schafer’s legislative changes are against the SA Schools Act and collective agreements reached in the bargaining council. “We are taking legal advice on how to proceed,” said Sadtu Western Cape provincial secretary Jonavon Rustin.