The government will be taken to court after accusations that it pacified unions by deciding to close all public schools for four weeks, less than a month after it won a legal challenge to its decision to reopen the country’s economy along with it schools.
But things seemed to have changed and after intense pressure from teachers’ unions, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced last week that public schools would be closed until August 24, a move that will push the academic year beyond the end of 2020.
Concerns have been raised about the effect on child development in an already substantially unequal country, and the economic effect of closing schools.
The DA on Friday said it would lodge a court application on the grounds that the decision was not based on scientific evidence, and was not in the interest of SA’s 14-million school-children. DA leader John Steenhuisen said the cost of closing schools was profound and would be borne by children and families for many years.
"Many children will drop out of school never to return, and many more will fall so far behind that they are never able to catch up. Inequality in our society will increase, as poorer families are not able to provide any at-home learning, while more resourced families will naturally do whatever is possible to continue their children’s education even while schools are closed," he said.
Long-term consequences
The decision to close schools is unlikely to have immediate fiscal ramifications — as the annual R173.6bn to pay state teachers has already been budgeted. But it is the long-term consequences of the additional school closure that will cost SA, according to Servaas van der Berg, professor in economics at Stellenbosch University and the SA national research chair in the economics of social policy.
These include problems such as lost learning time for children, felt most keenly by the poorest learners, who do not have the resources — such as ready access to the internet — to supplement learning, which deepens inequality within the school system and, ultimately, the wider economy, he said.
In a paper co-authored with economist Nic Spaull, written before the latest school closure, they referenced assessment data from the US, which showed that Covid-19 could result in a child losing about half of their mathematics progress and about a third of their reading progress. But these effects are likely to be drastically under-estimated in SA’s case due to "the low levels of educational materials at home, the lack of educational technology such as computers and the internet, and the inability of most SA teachers to continue teaching while children are not at school", Van der Berg and Spaull said.
They estimated for the poorest 80% of learners in SA virtually no curricular learning was taking place under lockdown.
SA is likely to see a considerable number of children falling back in their learning, undermining what progress it has made in improving educational performance. This has the potential to worsen already deep inequalities in the economy.
"The school system is just so terribly unequal that the labour market reflects that and therefore you have a very high premium on highly educated people and a minimum wage floor for poorly educated people."
The pandemic, the lockdown and now school closures would make the situation worse.
The decision is expected to have profound effects on the finances of many schools, according to Anthea Cereseto, the CEO of the Governing Body Foundation, which represents a range of public schools across all provinces. Many fee-paying schools have lost income, and are faced with being unable to afford school-funded teaching and support service posts, while government-funded teachers are "entirely protected".
Concern has been raised about allowing independent schools to remain open, but Mandla Mthembu, chair of the National Alliance of Independent Schools Associations, said that closing private schools would have had dire financial implications, especially when fee collection was low and some teachers had to take pay cuts.
Basic education department spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga said that after listening to more than 60 organisations with conflicting views, it became clear that a break was required. He said the insinuation that the state capitulated to politically aligned unions was "mischievous and downright" dangerous.
"South Africans are divided on this matter; whichever decision the government took, it would be equally criticised. The government listened to everyone. Scientists are not the only players in the environment."
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