The chair of parliament’s portfolio committee on basic education has bowed to pressure from opposition MPs and agreed to make staff available to answer questions about how they handled public submissions on the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill.
If passed, the bill will change legislation governing schools extensively. It will include a new requirement that provincial heads of education approve schools’ admission and language policies. It will also extend compulsory schooling from grade 1 to grade R, entail tighter oversight of home schooling, and provide for prison terms of up to a year for parents who stop their children attending school.
It emerged on Tuesday that more than 9,000 emailed submissions on the bill were not analysed, raising questions about whether the committee might be exposing the bill to legal challenge. The Constitutional Court has repeatedly censured parliament for failing to conduct meaningful public consultation on legislation, most recently with the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act, which the court threw out in May.
Opposition MPs were so incensed by the chair’s refusal to entertain questions on the issue, or discuss apparent contradictions in a report provided to the committee on its public consultation process on the bill, that they walked out of Tuesday’s meeting in protest.
Committee chair Bongiwe Mbinqo-Gigaba said on Wednesday she had asked the committee’s content adviser to provide a response to the issues raised by the DA and ACDP.
DA MP Baxolile Nadoda said he is not entirely satisfied with Gigaba’s response, as the committee on Tuesday adopted the report on public submissions, despite its obvious shortcomings. “The report cannot be adopted and then they go and fix it — that is procedurally flawed,” he said.
Forced delay
Gigaba also agreed to a request by opposition MPs to invite the Treasury to brief MPs on the financial implications of the bill in extending compulsory schooling from Grade 1 to Grade R. The basic education department previously told the committee the extra staffing and infrastructure requirements of providing compulsory grade R education could cost as much as R17.2bn a year.
Tuesday’s walkout by the DA and ACDP left the committee without a decision-making quorum, and forced it to delay its clause-by-clause consideration of the bill until Wednesday.
One of the bill’s most controversial aspects is its proposal that provincial heads of education approve schools’ admission and language policies. FF+ MP Wynand Boshoff said these provisions would create an unmanageable administrative burden for provincial education departments.
Nadoda said school governing bodies should retain their power to determine admission and language policies, with an appeal process run by the provincial education department. “We can never run away from the fact that some schools use admission policies to exclude certain learners, but let communities determine the best admission (and language) policy, with intervention from the department when required,” he said.
The ANC’s Patamedi Moroatshehla said he supports the bill’s stance on language and admission policies. Many public submissions on the bill described how school governing body admission policies effectively exclude learners.
“One of the reasons for amending the SA Schools Act [and replacing it with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill] is to align it with recent court decisions and ensure due process is followed,” he said, referring to the Rivonia Primary School admission case in which the Constitutional Court ruled that the head of the provincial department of education had ultimate control of how many pupils can be admitted to a school.
Once legislators complete their line-by-line deliberations, parliament’s legal advisers will consolidate their input into what is known as an A-list, which, once approved, will be used to draft a revised version of the bill. The revised draft legislation, known as the B-Bill, will be submitted to the National Assembly for the second reading debate. If passed, it will be referred to the National Council of Provinces for concurrence.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.