The South African education system in 2000 consisted of 26789 public and 971 independent (mainly low-fee charging) schools accommodating almost 12 million pupils. Given its size and the diverse population it caters for, it is an extremely complex system.

Major challenges it faces include:

• an apartheid legacy of racial and economic discrimination that has left up to a quarter of all schools without water within walking distance and up to 40% of all schools without access to electricity
• persistent and deepening disparities between the working and middle classes.

Given these complexities, the government has committed itself to democratising the education system. In 1996 it passed the South African Schools Act (SASA) to deal explicitly with undoing the country’s discriminatory past and to smooth the path for an open, just and equitable system. The essential idea behind the Act was to put ownership and control of schools in the hands of parents. It mandated the establishment of a School Governing Body (SGB) at every public school in the country. The responsibilities given to SGBs include:

• recommending teacher appointments
• developing mission statements, codes of conduct and admission policy
• in special cases, administering school finances and property.

The law was intended to build the democratic capacity of the South African people. Each province has been given a two month period in 2003 to manage SGB elections which have become the fourth largest public elections in the country. But how well is the system working? Is it building democracy?

There are signs of a vibrant new civil society presence in South African schools. As the leader of a Ministerial Review Committee into the status of SGBs, the author observed SGB and school communities through public hearings throughout the country. The hearings, organised by the Ministerial Review Committee, sought to give members of the public, and specifically, ordinary parent members of SGBs, an opportunity to talk about how well these structures were working. These revealed the strong level of commitment parent communities, even in poor and marginalized areas, have made to meeting the challenges of developing budgets, making teacher appointments and so on. There have been large gains that will no doubt extend into other areas of parents' civic lives.

But the heritage of the country persists. The hearings revealed that in schools that are mainly African, teachers dominate SGBs despite parents having the majority voice. Parents defer to the teachers because of teachers‘ class positions. In the formerly white schools, even those that are now predominantly black (African, Indian and coloured), white professionals dominate, again because of their perceived superior education. Consequently, the poor are having their interests articulated and defined for them by the middle-class (the black teaching middle-class in black schools and the white professional middle-class in mixed schools). Parents in particular, and black parents specifically, find they have little chance to participate in SGBs and in many instances are either silenced or withdraw altogether.

The challenge for the future is to find ways of moving democratic governance of schools from an idea to practice amid such economic diversity. The purpose of the legislation is to increase democratic control of schools. But this will not be achieved unless serious interventions are made in the schools. Minimally, the following will have to be done:

• Increase training efforts to build the capacity of working-class parents in areas such as managing meetings, managing finances and awareness of the different laws that pertain to school governance, including labour laws.
• Develop protocols for integrated schools for dealing with class and racial diversity at the parent level.
• Develop guidelines for achieving true representation on SGBs.
• Cluster schools and their SGBs to share and develop their capacity.

Source(s):
‘Desk Top Review of School Governance in South Africa’, J. Pampallis, Mimeo, 2003 (Mimeo, CEPD, PO Box 31892 Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2017, South Africa
‘Education De/Centralisation and the Quest for Equity, Democracy and Quality’, by S. Grant Lewis and S. Motala, in ‘Education and Social Change in South Africa’, by L. Chisholm, Pretoria, HSRC (forthcoming)

id21 Research Highlight: 12 September, 2003

Further Information:
Crain Soudien
School of Education
University of Cape Town
Private Bag
Rondebosch
Cape Town
South Africa 7701

Tel: +27 21 650 2768
Fax: +27 21 650 3489
Contact the contributor: cs@humanities.uct.ac.za

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Other related links:
See the id21 links page on inclusive education

'Class struggles: the challenges of achieving schooling for all', Insights Education #2

'Parental participation - boosting democracy in school governance'