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Class control
The school governance
challenge in South Africa
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?
Strong commitment
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 ahead
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.
Crain Soudien
School of Education
University of Cape Town
Private Bag
Rondebosch
Cape
South Africa 7701
T: +27 21 650 2768
F: +27 21 650 3489
cs@humanities.uct.ac.za
See also:
‘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)
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