Provincial legislatures have voted along party lines on the controversial Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill, with all eight of the ANC-held provinces giving it the green light and only the DA-led Western Cape voicing dissent.
The National Council of Provinces’ (NCOP’s) select committee on education, technology, sports, arts and culture wrapped up its work on the bill on Thursday with receipt of the provinces’ final mandates.
The bill will now be considered by a plenary sitting of the NCOP, where it is expected to be approved due to the ANC’s majority. As MPs on the committee have made some changes to the bill, it will then be referred back to the National Assembly for concurrence before being sent to the president for assent.
The bill proposes changes to the two key pieces of legislation now governing schools — the SA Schools Act of 1996 and the Employment of Educators Act of 1998. The basic education department says these changes are intended to provide legal clarity on issues that have previously been contested in court — such as language and admission policies — and bring the law into line with developments in the sector.
The amendments made by MPs on the select committee are relatively minor and leave the bill’s most controversial measures largely intact. These include giving the final say on schools’ language and admission policies to provincial education departments, granting their heads the power to direct schools to teach in more than one language, and introducing new regulatory requirements for home schooling, which has until now been largely unregulated.
The bill also extends compulsory schooling by an extra year to include grade R and centralises the procurement of learning and teaching support materials.
The DA has consistently raised concerns on these points and questioned whether parliament gave adequate weight to public input on the bill. The draft legislation was submitted to parliament in December 2021 for consideration first by the National Assembly and then the NCOP. The DA has previously said it was “deeply troubled” by the public consultation process, maintaining that thousands of emailed submissions were not analysed by the select committee.
It has also flagged the financial implications of the bill, as extending compulsory schooling to include grade R is expected to cost more than R17bn a year, according to the basic education department.
Among the changes introduced by the committee are an amendment to the clauses dealing with procurement, which now allow a school governing body to opt out of centralised procurement if it can provide documented evidence that it can source materials more cheaply elsewhere.
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.