Date: 26/11/2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Pandor: World conference on right to and rights in education
Address by Naledi Pandor, MP, Minister of Education, South Africa, at World conference on the right to and rights in education, University of Amsterdam
“Access and Equity in South African Education”
Your Excellencies
Distinguished Participants
Ladies and Gentlemen
Introduction
Among economic and social rights, the right to education holds a central place. Education is the basis for development and no state desiring to foster development can neglect to invest in education or to undertake concrete measures, at a national level, for realising the right to education.
Realising the right to education and universalising the access to quality basic education for all is one of the biggest development challenges today.
However, one witnesses unprecedented disparities in access and quality as the demand for education grows and what is on offer becomes more diverse. Making quality basic education accessible to all the children is the challenge of our times.
The challenge lies in transforming this right from an ideal to a living reality.
The legacy of apartheid
The apartheid schooling system was a brutal instrument of oppression against the intellect and aspirations of South Africa’s youth.
Yet that same system also served as a site for an intense struggle against oppression, a struggle in which many of today’s leaders learnt the meaning of freedom and justice.
In 1994 a government elected by the people of our country began the process of setting the schooling system on a more normal course, where institutions could nurture our youth in an environment of peace, and produce the scientists, teachers, voters, mothers, fathers, politicians and business people of the next generations, generations for whom apartheid and the denial of access to learning would be a thing of the past.
We have taken remarkable strides in the direction we have chosen.
We have made some mistakes along the way, and have learnt from them. In some ways, we have only just begun the journey towards the full transformation of our schools. Given the depths of oppression, deprivation, and marginalisation visited on our people under apartheid, we have tackled the project of transformation with extreme urgency. We are understandably impatient for change. We are confident that we have improved access to schools and significantly improved equity.
Democratic government initiatives
The most important initiative we took was to introduce compulsory schooling and basic education rights. In 1996 compulsory education was legislated for learners aged 7 to 15 years by the South African Schools Act. Since the mid-1990s participation rates of young people in education have improved as a result of the policy of compulsory basic education with a particularly encouraging increase in the participation rate by younger children in the population.
Spending on school education has more than doubled in nominal terms over the past ten years. During the same period, participation rates increased at all levels, mainly as a result of the entrance of African pupils in the early 1990s. They had been starved of education before 1994.
In recent years, the challenge has been to ensure and maintain the participation of disabled learners, male learners in rural and farming communities, female learners in the face of the pressures related to care, support and household chores, and male learners after the age of 16.
Furthermore, the South African Constitution (1996) requires education to be transformed and democratised in accordance with the values of human dignity, equality, human rights and freedom, non-racism and non-sexism. It guarantees access to basic education for all, including adult basic education, and progressive access to further education and training. We have revolutionized our curriculum so as to reflect and enforce these constitutional values. Our attention has also been directed at values in society, education and diversity and the promotion of basic social and cultural rights.
One quarter of our population spend most of their time in educational institutions each day. It is not surprising that we have taken special steps to ensure that these institutions are places of safety free from violence. We developed a national schools safety policy framework that enhances self-protection for all but particularly for girl pupils. We ended the use of corporal punishment as a tool of discipline.
We devolved the control of schooling to communities and we have developed a model of democratic governance that is unlike any other in the world today. The South African Schools Act establishes governing bodies to help the principal to administer schools property, establish a code of conduct, school starting times, and in some cases, administer the schools financial affairs. The establishment of these school governing bodies comprising parents, educators, non-educator staff, and (in secondary schools) pupils immediately created a challenge for skills development in management and governance so that all governing bodies could function properly, democratically and legally.
In addition, participation in running the affairs of just under 30,000 schools also enables more communities to be involved in a practical way in quality improvement and local accountability in the education system.
Schools are allowed to charge fees, but we took steps to ensure that no pupil was denied the right to education because their parents were unable to pay. School governing bodies set those school fees, and clear guidelines are set out for applying for and granting fee exemptions to poor learners.
However, as I will tell you in a moment, there have been problems in applying this policy in practice.
Our institutions of higher education, universities and technikons, have always charged fees.
This power was a barrier to widening access to the many black students who had been denied an education under the apartheid system. So we set up a government bursary and loan scheme to fund the tuition fees and living expenses of students.
Over the last ten years we have invested about R4 billion into the scheme and this has resulted in a total transformation of the race and gender profile of higher education. But even this generous scheme is not enough to satisfy the dammed-up thirst for education of our people and we are currently exploring further methods of financing higher education.
The introduction of compulsory education has not led to a run-away growth in private school education. In many developing countries, the independent education system is substantial. In South Africa, fewer than 3% of school-going learners attend independent schools.
Ensuring that public education of high quality enables the participation of children from all backgrounds in education is a deliberate strategy of the government in South Africa. This is unlike other countries where the middle class has opted out of public education participation, and there has been a decline in the public education system.
South Africa is a middle-income developing country. Although the democratic government’s macro-economic policies have been successful in giving us a period of growth that is unparalleled in our history, many of our people are still confronted by the spectre of poverty.
Government also acknowledges that children cannot learn if they are hungry. We know that the right to basic education cannot be fulfilled without satisfying the child’s right to “basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services’ (section 28).
That is why we introduced school nutrition programmes to ensure that poor pupils do not study on empty stomachs. Pro-poor nutrition programmes enable and enhance participation and learner achievement.
The expansion of the funds allocated to these nutrition programmes in recent years has expanded participation in schools. The government is developing implementation and monitoring systems to ensure that the poorest learners in primary schools and the reception grade receive a state-funded meal on all school days.
School fees
Having restructured our education system from a racially divided one into a unified system and achieved an enviable enrolment rate of pupils, we had to grapple with finding the best balance between public and private resources.
People have asked why we introduced both compulsory education for all between the ages of 7 and 15 years and allowed public schools to charge fees at the same time.
How can you have a compulsory school system for which you have to pay, they asked? When other countries introduced compulsory education, they made it available for free.
We made an explicit decision to allow public schools to supplement public funds with school fees. We did so despite a deep commitment in the African National Congress during the final years of the apartheid period to provide all children with access to a free basic education. We have continued that policy in spite of the current global pressure to eliminate fees at the primary level.
The South African government adopted a fees-based policy for a variety of reasons, mindful that there were two important constraints.
First, we were constrained by the limited availability of public resources. The new democratic government realized soon after coming into power that there were insufficient funds to provide a quality education for all. You must remember that in 1994 whites comprised only 17% of the population and we saw that the redistribution of funds from the formerly white schools would not serve positive objectives, because it would not be able to totally finance education costs in formerly disadvantaged communities. Our large-scale massification programme required a more nuanced yet somewhat troubling approach.
The second constraint was the pressure for local control over education. This pressure came from both white and black parents. And just as much as our constitution was negotiated and certain compromises were made, so we made compromises in education.
You must also remember that our people viewed schools as instruments of the government during the struggle against apartheid. They were instruments of control and the education on offer was partial, biased, and racist.
So we had to rebuild trust in the schooling system and the best route was to give ownership of the schools back to local communities. Our naivete was to assume that the ‘ownership’ would be supported by progressive objectives of inclusion and equality. This has not been the case in all public schools.
Within those constraints our policy was shaped by the belief that it was critical to prevent a flight from the public schools into private schools. We did not want to create a two-tier system.
What we have seen is that the fee policy has succeeded in keeping students in the public school system and has not led to the decline in enrolment as in other countries.
What the South African government did was to mobilize private resources to give effect to achieving access and equity in public education. Our belief was that by charging fees in those schools where pupils’ parents could afford to pay we would Free State funds to distribute to schools serving poor communities.
Our system today includes schools in suburbs that display ‘First World’ opulence, where parents contribute vast sums of money to the school in order to maintain costly sporting facilities and extensive media centres. Our system also includes schools that serve rural communities that are desperately poor, and where parents are mostly illiterate.
We have found that historical privilege is very difficult to overturn.
The South African government continues to make a significant investment of public resources in schools catering for the rich; the stark inequalities referred to here make it an imperative for government to spend more on poor schools than rich schools.
We have decided to act more firmly to provide free basic education to the poor in South Africa.
Last year we adopted an action plan to give effect to this objective. (1)
The core aspects of the plan are:
* Public funding of schools, especially where learners are poor, must be sufficient to cover the cost of all the basic inputs required for a quality education;
* Schooling must ensure the opportunity for meaningful knowledge acquisition and skills development that will empower learners to take part fully in the economic, political and cultural life of the country; and
* No learners, especially those of compulsory school-going age, should experience any economic, physical or other barriers to attending school.
Working as we do within a system of co-operative governance in which the provinces have the major role to play in administering the school system, the implementation of this policy is no simple matter.
Let me conclude by spelling out three further major challenges that we currently face.
Teachers
First, no education system can function without committed and qualified teachers. Decades of under-investment in teachers came home to roost when our first democratic government took office in 1994.
We could not move good teachers from the previously advantaged to schools in the suburbs to disadvantaged schools in the townships. Instead, poorer provinces employed new teachers and they were often un- or underqualified.
At the same time the previously advantaged schools employed more teachers, as they were allowed to do under the powers given to them by the South African Schools Act. They set school fees that would enable the employment of additional teachers, teachers who are not employed by the provincial departments but by the school. The emergence of a freedom of choice meant middle class and ambitious black parents were able to send their children to these ex-white schools and thus to substantially increase their fee/private income.
Additional teachers allow for low pupil/teacher ratios. What we have found is that some principals focus on securing additional income and neglect to inform parents about our fee-exemption policy.
In urban areas, this failure to provide information on fee exemptions acts as an access barrier to well-resourced schools. This is an explosive policy area that South Africa must attend to.
The rapid growth of informal settlements also means that families have to rely on access to neighbouring schools, but are often excluded by the inability to pay fees. The shame and humiliations imposed by the inability to pay even minimal school fees is a pervasive feature of the lives of the poor.
So we are taking steps to make sure that these practices stop.
We face a major equity task to ensure that the inequalities of the apartheid system are not reproduced in our new constitutional order.
An important aspect of this challenge is the extensive programme we have introduced to upgrade the qualifications of unqualified and inadequately qualified teachers. From more than 85 000 unqualified teachers in 1999 (out of 350,000), we now have less than 20 000. Upgrading has made a big difference to the teachers concerned, and contributed to improving the quality of teaching.
Racial integration in schools
A second major challenge is to ensure racial integration in our schools. Given the vast literature on this aspect of schooling in America, educationists look at us as they might look at a laboratory experiment.
What we have seen is a significant deracialisation in privileged schools. However, the formerly disadvantaged schools remain largely unchanged. Despite reconciliation at national level and integration at school level, racism persists in some of our schools. The rich and middle classes are integrating, the poor remain marginal and outside these processes.
Curriculum
The final challenge relates to the introduction of a new curriculum.
We have introduced a curriculum that is shaped by the values that promote the interests of a society based on respect for democracy, equality, human dignity, and social justice. These values, which are derived from our constitution, represent a departure from the values of apartheid education, which were premised on inequality and a denial of human dignity.
Despite this new curriculum and the new pedagogy that it mandated, much remains to be done.
Our biggest challenge lies in improving educational outcomes. Positive outcomes are impacted upon by the current language of learning, which is English for the majority of learners. We know that pupils who attend classes conducted in a language that is not their first language are at a significant disadvantage and that this disadvantage is accentuated when the language of teaching and learning is not the first language of the teacher. We will have to determine realistic and successful remedies to this dilemma.
Conclusion
In closing, it is important to admit that policy idealism does not always result in outcomes that reflect the initial principles. At the early stage of democracy South Africa believed equality would be embraced as a self-evident necessity by all. Reality has proved much harder. Privilege is difficult to dislodge. We will have to more carefully analyse the possibility of securing cooperation of the wealthy in promoting access and quality for all. We will strengthen initiatives that support the poorest and improve our ability to assure parents that education has value and that quality education must be the desire and the achievement of all South Africans.
Province
Eastern Cape
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
2 085 326
2004
2 065 318
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
2 064 467
2004
2 060 666
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
99%
2004
100%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
1%
2004
0%
Province
Free State
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
726 153
2004
718 697
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
664 596
2004
664 678
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
92%
2004
92%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
8%
2004
8%
Province
Gauteng
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
1 770 452
2004
1 908 941
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
1 620 852
2004
1 652 659
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
92%
2004
87%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
8%
2004
13%
Province
KwaZulu-Natal
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
2 858 292
2004
2 915 558
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
2 684 475
2004
2 618 244
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
94%
2004
90%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
6%
2004
10%
Province
Limpopo
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
1 810 899
2004
1 887 829
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
1 723 773
2004
1 688 011
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
95%
2004
89%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
5%
2004
11%
Province
Mpumalanga
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
942 976
2004
976 538
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12) 2003
898 428
2004
895 947
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
95%
2004
92%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
5%
2004
8%
Province
Northern Cape
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
199 830
2004
188 782
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
194 883
2004
200 905
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
98%
2004
106%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
2%
2004
-6%
Province
North West
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
967 899
2004
1 004 877
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
886 280
2004
864 237
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
92%
2004
86%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
8%
2004
14%
Province
Western Cape
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
1 073 553
2004
1 087 465
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
919 604
2004
928 809
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
86%
2004
85%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
14%
2004
15%
National
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
12 435 380
2004
12 754 005
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
11 657 358
2004
11 574 156
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
94%
2004
91%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
6%
2004
9%
Sources:
1. Population: 2003 - Stats SA estimates (29 Oct 2003), 2004 - Stats SA Labour Force Survey (March 2004).
2. Enrolment: Approved 2003 and preliminary 2004 SNAP Survey (conducted on the 10th school day).
Notes:
1. Appropriate school-going age population for Grades 1-12 is for the ages 7-18 years old.
2. Enrolment data is for Grades 1-12, regardless of age.
3. Enrolment data make provision for under-aged and over-aged learners.
4. GER = Gross Enrolment Ratio = Number of school learners, regardless of age, enrolled in Grades 1-12, as a percentage of the total appropriate school-going age population (7-18 year olds).
5. GER is a crude but widely used indicator of the general level of participation in a given level of education.
(1) Plan of Action Improving access to free and quality basic education for all, DoE 2003.
Enquiries:
Mathula Mphande
Head of Communications
Cell: 082 371 1315
Issued by: Ministry of Education
26 November 2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Pandor: World conference on right to and rights in education
Address by Naledi Pandor, MP, Minister of Education, South Africa, at World conference on the right to and rights in education, University of Amsterdam
“Access and Equity in South African Education”
Your Excellencies
Distinguished Participants
Ladies and Gentlemen
Introduction
Among economic and social rights, the right to education holds a central place. Education is the basis for development and no state desiring to foster development can neglect to invest in education or to undertake concrete measures, at a national level, for realising the right to education.
Realising the right to education and universalising the access to quality basic education for all is one of the biggest development challenges today.
However, one witnesses unprecedented disparities in access and quality as the demand for education grows and what is on offer becomes more diverse. Making quality basic education accessible to all the children is the challenge of our times.
The challenge lies in transforming this right from an ideal to a living reality.
The legacy of apartheid
The apartheid schooling system was a brutal instrument of oppression against the intellect and aspirations of South Africa’s youth.
Yet that same system also served as a site for an intense struggle against oppression, a struggle in which many of today’s leaders learnt the meaning of freedom and justice.
In 1994 a government elected by the people of our country began the process of setting the schooling system on a more normal course, where institutions could nurture our youth in an environment of peace, and produce the scientists, teachers, voters, mothers, fathers, politicians and business people of the next generations, generations for whom apartheid and the denial of access to learning would be a thing of the past.
We have taken remarkable strides in the direction we have chosen.
We have made some mistakes along the way, and have learnt from them. In some ways, we have only just begun the journey towards the full transformation of our schools. Given the depths of oppression, deprivation, and marginalisation visited on our people under apartheid, we have tackled the project of transformation with extreme urgency. We are understandably impatient for change. We are confident that we have improved access to schools and significantly improved equity.
Democratic government initiatives
The most important initiative we took was to introduce compulsory schooling and basic education rights. In 1996 compulsory education was legislated for learners aged 7 to 15 years by the South African Schools Act. Since the mid-1990s participation rates of young people in education have improved as a result of the policy of compulsory basic education with a particularly encouraging increase in the participation rate by younger children in the population.
Spending on school education has more than doubled in nominal terms over the past ten years. During the same period, participation rates increased at all levels, mainly as a result of the entrance of African pupils in the early 1990s. They had been starved of education before 1994.
In recent years, the challenge has been to ensure and maintain the participation of disabled learners, male learners in rural and farming communities, female learners in the face of the pressures related to care, support and household chores, and male learners after the age of 16.
Furthermore, the South African Constitution (1996) requires education to be transformed and democratised in accordance with the values of human dignity, equality, human rights and freedom, non-racism and non-sexism. It guarantees access to basic education for all, including adult basic education, and progressive access to further education and training. We have revolutionized our curriculum so as to reflect and enforce these constitutional values. Our attention has also been directed at values in society, education and diversity and the promotion of basic social and cultural rights.
One quarter of our population spend most of their time in educational institutions each day. It is not surprising that we have taken special steps to ensure that these institutions are places of safety free from violence. We developed a national schools safety policy framework that enhances self-protection for all but particularly for girl pupils. We ended the use of corporal punishment as a tool of discipline.
We devolved the control of schooling to communities and we have developed a model of democratic governance that is unlike any other in the world today. The South African Schools Act establishes governing bodies to help the principal to administer schools property, establish a code of conduct, school starting times, and in some cases, administer the schools financial affairs. The establishment of these school governing bodies comprising parents, educators, non-educator staff, and (in secondary schools) pupils immediately created a challenge for skills development in management and governance so that all governing bodies could function properly, democratically and legally.
In addition, participation in running the affairs of just under 30,000 schools also enables more communities to be involved in a practical way in quality improvement and local accountability in the education system.
Schools are allowed to charge fees, but we took steps to ensure that no pupil was denied the right to education because their parents were unable to pay. School governing bodies set those school fees, and clear guidelines are set out for applying for and granting fee exemptions to poor learners.
However, as I will tell you in a moment, there have been problems in applying this policy in practice.
Our institutions of higher education, universities and technikons, have always charged fees.
This power was a barrier to widening access to the many black students who had been denied an education under the apartheid system. So we set up a government bursary and loan scheme to fund the tuition fees and living expenses of students.
Over the last ten years we have invested about R4 billion into the scheme and this has resulted in a total transformation of the race and gender profile of higher education. But even this generous scheme is not enough to satisfy the dammed-up thirst for education of our people and we are currently exploring further methods of financing higher education.
The introduction of compulsory education has not led to a run-away growth in private school education. In many developing countries, the independent education system is substantial. In South Africa, fewer than 3% of school-going learners attend independent schools.
Ensuring that public education of high quality enables the participation of children from all backgrounds in education is a deliberate strategy of the government in South Africa. This is unlike other countries where the middle class has opted out of public education participation, and there has been a decline in the public education system.
South Africa is a middle-income developing country. Although the democratic government’s macro-economic policies have been successful in giving us a period of growth that is unparalleled in our history, many of our people are still confronted by the spectre of poverty.
Government also acknowledges that children cannot learn if they are hungry. We know that the right to basic education cannot be fulfilled without satisfying the child’s right to “basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services’ (section 28).
That is why we introduced school nutrition programmes to ensure that poor pupils do not study on empty stomachs. Pro-poor nutrition programmes enable and enhance participation and learner achievement.
The expansion of the funds allocated to these nutrition programmes in recent years has expanded participation in schools. The government is developing implementation and monitoring systems to ensure that the poorest learners in primary schools and the reception grade receive a state-funded meal on all school days.
School fees
Having restructured our education system from a racially divided one into a unified system and achieved an enviable enrolment rate of pupils, we had to grapple with finding the best balance between public and private resources.
People have asked why we introduced both compulsory education for all between the ages of 7 and 15 years and allowed public schools to charge fees at the same time.
How can you have a compulsory school system for which you have to pay, they asked? When other countries introduced compulsory education, they made it available for free.
We made an explicit decision to allow public schools to supplement public funds with school fees. We did so despite a deep commitment in the African National Congress during the final years of the apartheid period to provide all children with access to a free basic education. We have continued that policy in spite of the current global pressure to eliminate fees at the primary level.
The South African government adopted a fees-based policy for a variety of reasons, mindful that there were two important constraints.
First, we were constrained by the limited availability of public resources. The new democratic government realized soon after coming into power that there were insufficient funds to provide a quality education for all. You must remember that in 1994 whites comprised only 17% of the population and we saw that the redistribution of funds from the formerly white schools would not serve positive objectives, because it would not be able to totally finance education costs in formerly disadvantaged communities. Our large-scale massification programme required a more nuanced yet somewhat troubling approach.
The second constraint was the pressure for local control over education. This pressure came from both white and black parents. And just as much as our constitution was negotiated and certain compromises were made, so we made compromises in education.
You must also remember that our people viewed schools as instruments of the government during the struggle against apartheid. They were instruments of control and the education on offer was partial, biased, and racist.
So we had to rebuild trust in the schooling system and the best route was to give ownership of the schools back to local communities. Our naivete was to assume that the ‘ownership’ would be supported by progressive objectives of inclusion and equality. This has not been the case in all public schools.
Within those constraints our policy was shaped by the belief that it was critical to prevent a flight from the public schools into private schools. We did not want to create a two-tier system.
What we have seen is that the fee policy has succeeded in keeping students in the public school system and has not led to the decline in enrolment as in other countries.
What the South African government did was to mobilize private resources to give effect to achieving access and equity in public education. Our belief was that by charging fees in those schools where pupils’ parents could afford to pay we would Free State funds to distribute to schools serving poor communities.
Our system today includes schools in suburbs that display ‘First World’ opulence, where parents contribute vast sums of money to the school in order to maintain costly sporting facilities and extensive media centres. Our system also includes schools that serve rural communities that are desperately poor, and where parents are mostly illiterate.
We have found that historical privilege is very difficult to overturn.
The South African government continues to make a significant investment of public resources in schools catering for the rich; the stark inequalities referred to here make it an imperative for government to spend more on poor schools than rich schools.
We have decided to act more firmly to provide free basic education to the poor in South Africa.
Last year we adopted an action plan to give effect to this objective. (1)
The core aspects of the plan are:
* Public funding of schools, especially where learners are poor, must be sufficient to cover the cost of all the basic inputs required for a quality education;
* Schooling must ensure the opportunity for meaningful knowledge acquisition and skills development that will empower learners to take part fully in the economic, political and cultural life of the country; and
* No learners, especially those of compulsory school-going age, should experience any economic, physical or other barriers to attending school.
Working as we do within a system of co-operative governance in which the provinces have the major role to play in administering the school system, the implementation of this policy is no simple matter.
Let me conclude by spelling out three further major challenges that we currently face.
Teachers
First, no education system can function without committed and qualified teachers. Decades of under-investment in teachers came home to roost when our first democratic government took office in 1994.
We could not move good teachers from the previously advantaged to schools in the suburbs to disadvantaged schools in the townships. Instead, poorer provinces employed new teachers and they were often un- or underqualified.
At the same time the previously advantaged schools employed more teachers, as they were allowed to do under the powers given to them by the South African Schools Act. They set school fees that would enable the employment of additional teachers, teachers who are not employed by the provincial departments but by the school. The emergence of a freedom of choice meant middle class and ambitious black parents were able to send their children to these ex-white schools and thus to substantially increase their fee/private income.
Additional teachers allow for low pupil/teacher ratios. What we have found is that some principals focus on securing additional income and neglect to inform parents about our fee-exemption policy.
In urban areas, this failure to provide information on fee exemptions acts as an access barrier to well-resourced schools. This is an explosive policy area that South Africa must attend to.
The rapid growth of informal settlements also means that families have to rely on access to neighbouring schools, but are often excluded by the inability to pay fees. The shame and humiliations imposed by the inability to pay even minimal school fees is a pervasive feature of the lives of the poor.
So we are taking steps to make sure that these practices stop.
We face a major equity task to ensure that the inequalities of the apartheid system are not reproduced in our new constitutional order.
An important aspect of this challenge is the extensive programme we have introduced to upgrade the qualifications of unqualified and inadequately qualified teachers. From more than 85 000 unqualified teachers in 1999 (out of 350,000), we now have less than 20 000. Upgrading has made a big difference to the teachers concerned, and contributed to improving the quality of teaching.
Racial integration in schools
A second major challenge is to ensure racial integration in our schools. Given the vast literature on this aspect of schooling in America, educationists look at us as they might look at a laboratory experiment.
What we have seen is a significant deracialisation in privileged schools. However, the formerly disadvantaged schools remain largely unchanged. Despite reconciliation at national level and integration at school level, racism persists in some of our schools. The rich and middle classes are integrating, the poor remain marginal and outside these processes.
Curriculum
The final challenge relates to the introduction of a new curriculum.
We have introduced a curriculum that is shaped by the values that promote the interests of a society based on respect for democracy, equality, human dignity, and social justice. These values, which are derived from our constitution, represent a departure from the values of apartheid education, which were premised on inequality and a denial of human dignity.
Despite this new curriculum and the new pedagogy that it mandated, much remains to be done.
Our biggest challenge lies in improving educational outcomes. Positive outcomes are impacted upon by the current language of learning, which is English for the majority of learners. We know that pupils who attend classes conducted in a language that is not their first language are at a significant disadvantage and that this disadvantage is accentuated when the language of teaching and learning is not the first language of the teacher. We will have to determine realistic and successful remedies to this dilemma.
Conclusion
In closing, it is important to admit that policy idealism does not always result in outcomes that reflect the initial principles. At the early stage of democracy South Africa believed equality would be embraced as a self-evident necessity by all. Reality has proved much harder. Privilege is difficult to dislodge. We will have to more carefully analyse the possibility of securing cooperation of the wealthy in promoting access and quality for all. We will strengthen initiatives that support the poorest and improve our ability to assure parents that education has value and that quality education must be the desire and the achievement of all South Africans.
Province
Eastern Cape
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
2 085 326
2004
2 065 318
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
2 064 467
2004
2 060 666
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
99%
2004
100%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
1%
2004
0%
Province
Free State
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
726 153
2004
718 697
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
664 596
2004
664 678
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
92%
2004
92%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
8%
2004
8%
Province
Gauteng
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
1 770 452
2004
1 908 941
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
1 620 852
2004
1 652 659
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
92%
2004
87%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
8%
2004
13%
Province
KwaZulu-Natal
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
2 858 292
2004
2 915 558
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
2 684 475
2004
2 618 244
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
94%
2004
90%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
6%
2004
10%
Province
Limpopo
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
1 810 899
2004
1 887 829
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
1 723 773
2004
1 688 011
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
95%
2004
89%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
5%
2004
11%
Province
Mpumalanga
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
942 976
2004
976 538
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12) 2003
898 428
2004
895 947
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
95%
2004
92%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
5%
2004
8%
Province
Northern Cape
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
199 830
2004
188 782
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
194 883
2004
200 905
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
98%
2004
106%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
2%
2004
-6%
Province
North West
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
967 899
2004
1 004 877
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
886 280
2004
864 237
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
92%
2004
86%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
8%
2004
14%
Province
Western Cape
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
1 073 553
2004
1 087 465
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
919 604
2004
928 809
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
86%
2004
85%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
14%
2004
15%
National
(a) (i) School-Going age population (7-18 year old)
2003
12 435 380
2004
12 754 005
(a) (ii) School enrolment (Gr 1-12)
2003
11 657 358
2004
11 574 156
(b) GER (indicator of participation rate)
2003
94%
2004
91%
100%-GER (indicator of children not attending school)
2003
6%
2004
9%
Sources:
1. Population: 2003 - Stats SA estimates (29 Oct 2003), 2004 - Stats SA Labour Force Survey (March 2004).
2. Enrolment: Approved 2003 and preliminary 2004 SNAP Survey (conducted on the 10th school day).
Notes:
1. Appropriate school-going age population for Grades 1-12 is for the ages 7-18 years old.
2. Enrolment data is for Grades 1-12, regardless of age.
3. Enrolment data make provision for under-aged and over-aged learners.
4. GER = Gross Enrolment Ratio = Number of school learners, regardless of age, enrolled in Grades 1-12, as a percentage of the total appropriate school-going age population (7-18 year olds).
5. GER is a crude but widely used indicator of the general level of participation in a given level of education.
(1) Plan of Action Improving access to free and quality basic education for all, DoE 2003.
Enquiries:
Mathula Mphande
Head of Communications
Cell: 082 371 1315
Issued by: Ministry of Education
26 November 2004
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