Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
the early 1990s, access to schooling among black South Africans became almost universal at primary school level, while black participation in secondary schooling went up by 7% a year between 1990 and 1995.6
Better access to schooling among Africans was followed by a rise in the number of African matriculants. In 1955 only 260 Africans had been able to matriculate, but by 1986 the number had risen to 52 000 (which was roughly the same as the number of white matriculants that year). By 1994 the number of Africans matriculating had virtually quadrupled to 201 000, whereas the number of white matriculants had remained much the same. Moreover, whereas in 1955 only 90 Africans had passed matric with results good enough for university entrance, by 1986 this number had risen to 13 000. Between then and 1994, it rose to 45 000, an increase of 250%. However, by comparison with the size of the African population (then 25.9 million),7 this was a tiny number, making up only 0.15% of the total.
Key changes in education since 1994
Officially, South Africa has no affirmative action policies in schooling, all pupils having an equal right (under Section 29 of the Constitution) to ‘a basic education’ from Grades 0 to 9. Hence, it is only at the ‘further education and training’ (FET) level – and especially among the country’s 23 public universities and universities of technology – that affirmative action in admissions is applied, as further outlined below. However, even at the basic education level, various changes have been made since 1994 to help compensate for past wrongs.
Access, fees, and teacher pay
The 1996 Constitution prohibits any school, whether public or private, from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race. In addition, all public schools are barred (under the South African Schools Act of 1996) from turning pupils away for an inability to pay school fees. Instead, those state schools that still charge fees – in practice, many of them former Model C schools, which earlier catered mainly for white pupils – must grant a remission of fees in whole or part to parents unable to afford them. In 2013 the fee remissions provided to poor parents (most of them black) amounted to some R1 billion. The government is supposed to reimburse schools for such remissions but this money often remains unpaid – leaving wealthier parents (mainly whites) to shoulder the burden.8
A new funding formula has also been introduced. Government subsidies to public schools are based on a sliding scale, in which the largest amounts are allocated to the schools in the poorest areas. Almost all public schools have thus been divided into five quintiles, poorer schools having a low quintile ranking and better-resourced schools a higher one. Schools with the lowest quintile rankings receive more funding, while higher-ranked schools receive substantially less.
In addition, the government is incrementally phasing out the payment of school fees in poorer schools. Schools in the poorest quintile (quintile one) were the first to be exempted from the need to charge school fees. By 2012, the ‘no-fee’ system had been extended to schools in all but the wealthiest quintile, with the result that some 80% of public schools charged no fees at all. Instead, all their financial needs, in theory at least, were met via transfers from the government. However, many schools complain that the no-fee system has left them worse off than before, as inept state administration has often left them scrabbling for money to pay for essential supplies.9
Secondly, in what was effectively another aspect of affirmative action, the government took various steps to eliminate the pay differential between white and black teachers. In June 1996 the least qualified teachers (most of them African) received a R2.5-billion pay increase, which helped put their salaries more on a par with those of better-qualified staff. In addition, a new salary structure was put in place, which cut the prior link between salaries and qualifications in favour of ‘performance’ criteria that have since proved meaningless in practice.10
In 1996 and 1997 the government also encouraged more than 15 500 experienced (and mostly white) teachers to take severance packages and leave the schooling system – thus opening up a large number of senior posts to African teachers. However, many of those who left were mathematics and science teachers who could not readily be replaced. The impact was soon evident in educational outcomes, writes political analyst James Myburgh, for ‘the number of pupils passing higher grade maths fell from 22 800 in 1997 to around 19 300 in 2000, while the number of pupils passing higher grade physical science fell from 27 000 to roughly 23 300 in the same period’.11
Infrastructure and resources
The government has further sought to provide redress by improving essential school infrastructure. This has sometimes required the building of new schools, along with the rolling out to many existing ones of electricity, piped water, and modern sanitation. However, progress has been slow and often uneven. Hence, though 79% of schools now have on-site access to municipal electricity, only a third (32%) rely on municipal flush toilets, while only 40% of them are connected to a municipal water supply. In addition, a mere 5% of schools have stocked science laboratories, while only 7.5% have stocked libraries and only 10% have stocked computer centres.12
Ironically, much of the reason for slow progress in improving school infrastructure lies in affirmative action in school management and in the public service. This has resulted in more experienced people being replaced with less experienced ones, leading to often sharp declines in efficiency and institutional memory.
By 2008 it was already evident that many schools were being badly managed by inexperienced or ineffective principals, who were failing to ensure proper teacher performance or make the best use of their limited resources. This was still the situation in 2011, when the National Planning Commission released its first draft of a ‘national development plan’ (NDP), intended to raise South Africa’s annual rate of economic growth to 5.4% over a period of 20 years. The NDP put the blame for poor schooling primarily on bad teaching, but it also linked failures in teaching to ‘the quality of school leadership’ and urged that school principals should in future have ‘minimum qualifications’. Though many of the NDP’s proposals for reform were omitted from the final version of the plan, the revised document did again stress the need for school principals to be appointed on merit.13 Implicitly, this call for merit-based appointments acknowledges the harm that has resulted from allowing affirmative action in this sphere to take precedence over competence and experience.
Affirmative action within the Department of Education and other relevant state departments has also inhibited both the provision of school infrastructure and the delivery of essential goods and services to schools. Overall, it has contributed to a significant loss of skills across the public service, as a skills audit released in 2004 by the minister of public service and administration made clear. This report found that 50% of public sector employees were lower-skilled workers, while 40% were semi-skilled workers. Astonishingly, only 2% had managerial skills and 8% had unspecified ‘other’ skills.14
Many posts across the public sector – especially those requiring scarce financial and management skills – have also been left vacant where black applicants cannot be found. As a result, even standard functions such as the procurement and distribution of textbooks and school desks are often poorly executed, leaving many schools without access to even the most basic of the resources required for effective teaching.15
In addition, the education bureaucracy has repeatedly shown itself to be unable to respond efficiently to new tasks. For example, in the 2007/08 budget, the National Treasury allocated R180 million to library grants for schools (this being the first tranche of a R1-billion grant aimed at improving public libraries in general). However, by January 2008, three months before the end of the financial year, South Africa’s nine provincial administrations had collectively managed to spend less than 25% of the allocated funds. The Department of Education also launched a Quality Improvement, Development, Support and Upliftment Programme (Qids UP), which was intended to provide poor schools with R80 000 each, specifically for books and other resources. However, implementation was again hampered by an inability within provincial administrations to spend the money made available.16
In 2012 the annual report of the Department of Basic Education found that ‘many schools did not receive all the learning, teaching and support material needed’, including textbooks, workbooks, and other resources. The proportions of schools that had received the relevant materials ranged from 38% in Mpumalanga