Anti-Privatisation forum APF) on government School Financing

This article is an edited version of the APf submission made to the national department of Education in April 2003

This document was submitted to the national department of education in response to a call by the department for the public to respond to the Review of the Costs and Resourcing of Public Schools. The review of certain aspects of education policy was in part prompted by the work of the Anti- privatisation Forum, Education Rights Project and other social movements. The APF submission convincingly articulates the deep crisis in education and provides numerous concrete solutions.

The APf’s fundamental concerns with the department of Education’s approach to the Review

The APF has a number of fundamental problems with the review. These include its language, the process of the review itself, and most importantly the review’s basic approach to resolving the crisis in education.

Language or discourse of the review

The use of the language of business and production processes of ‘inputs and outputs’ is instructive of the DoE’s core audience focus. We have written our response in the language that reflects the day-to-day educational experience of poor students, their parents and the communities in which they live.

Review Process

Government set up a reference group of 27 members in September 2002. The reference group consisted of a core team from the DoE which worked with a group that included ‘prominent economists and managers from inside and outside government (pg 8) as well as the World Bank. There was no participation by any representatives of the labour movement’s education unions, school educators, governing bodies and community organisations.

Despite complaints by labour and community-based organisations in the past (around the introduction of GEAR and subsequent privatisation policy processes), this dismissive practice by government continues and again exposes the cosmetic nature of public engagements such as this that we are taking the time to respond to. The purpose of the review was ostensibly ‘to stimulate and inform constructive discussion’ on how government schools are resourced (pg 6). The public and civil society organisations have been asked to submit responses to the recommendations made in the review. The minister of education is then expected to use the review document together with the feedback from the public and interested parties, to decide strategies and policy amendments to deal with the problems in resourcing and financing government schools. Timeframes given by government for such public responses do not allow for democratic processes to run their course within organisations. It takes at least three months to allow for local engagement and mandating to be consolidated into soundly mandated organisational responses.

Furthermore, this particular review has not been adequately publicized to encourage wide ranging responses to be received from directly affected parties. We look forward to seeing a full report that details and analyses the responses received. In addition there needs to be a schedule of exactly which organisations, individuals, etcetera responded. This will allow us to determine the intention and success of the engagement with civil society.

Constitutional right to education Kadar Asmal’s opening message in the review recommends that in trying to address the problems, we should begin with the constitution of South Africa that requires that:

“Every person shall have the right …to a basic education and to equal access to educational institutions…” (Section 32a).

The APF accepts this starting point but finds it difficult to reconcile the 111 pages of the Department of Education (DoE) review and recommendations that consciously continues to push the responsibility for getting an education onto ‘households and the private sector ’. This fundamental issue of the right to a free basic education is not addressed in the review.

In fact, the pressure on government schools to cut costs at every turn pushes those increasing costs onto the communities in different ways:

 

• hidden fees that grow in the range and money demanded each year e.g. photocopying levies, computer levies, school outing fees, art supplies, etcetera. While the review acknowledges that this ‘may well be illegal’, the cost-cutting solutions proposed will force schools to find further ‘creative ways’ to deal with their bigger problem of inadequate resources.

 

• demands that households unable to pay fees must offer ‘in-kind’ contributions of unpaid labour in school vegetable gardens, cleaning school toilets, working in school kiosks, etcetera. Again, while the review acknowledges this abuse, the solutions proposed will only serve to perpetuate such ‘cost-cutting’ actions by schools.

 

• Fund-raising events that put pressures on households to pay additional money at every turn: from raffles to stokvels, discos, fun runs, school carnivals, etcetera.

There is a fundamental contradiction between on the one hand the ‘right to education’ and on the other hand the increasing shifting of responsibility for education from the state into the ‘free market’. The ‘free market’ by definition does not and cannot deliver to the rights of people. Education left to the market place to set the rules, will remain the preserve of the already privileged and be increasingly inaccessible to the poor. This is demonstrated in the statistics provided in the DoE School Register of Needs Survey (November 2001) that details how paid educators had decreased to 23,642 with 19,000 educators appointed by governing bodies and 4,642 by government. Governing body appointments are made through additional fund-raising initiatives by schools, which means the cost is shifted from the state to communities with the weight of the burden falling onto low or non-income earners!

There are further examples in the DoE register of needs survey of 2001 that demonstrates some of the huge problems we need to tackle:

• 27% of schools have no running water

• 43% of schools have no electricity

• Of 27,000 schools only 8,000 have flush sewers and 12,300 have pit latrines

• 80% of schools have no library

• 10,700 need additional classrooms

• Whereas in 1996, 4,377 reported ‘weak buildings’, by 2000 this figure was 9,375.

GEAR and the Education budget

Given that this DoE budgeting process is framed within the government’s macro-economic policy of GEAR (Growth Employment and Redistribution), we need to look at how GEAR proposes to deliver on our constitutional right to education:

“With spending on education at nearly 7 percent of GDP there is a need to contain expenditure through reductions in subsidisation of the more expensive parts of the system and greater private sector involvement in higher education. This will concentrate government resources on enhancing the educational opportunities of historically disadvantaged communities.” (GEAR,

1996, Section 6.1)

This highlights a fundamental contradiction that is so clearly demonstrated in the DoE review document. On the one hand GEAR argues that the education budget must be contained (i.e. effectively cut) and that the private sector must take on more responsibility. On the other hand there is a stated commitment to a ‘pro-poor ’ policy to compensate those historically disadvantaged.   The two are incompatible given the reality is that over 40% of South Africans are unemployed and essentially living in poverty.

The DoE Review acknowledges that it is possible that “…essentially sound policies might have been insufficiently funded…” (pg 9). Yet this is the last we hear of any recognition that significantly expanding the national budget for education might be the place to begin to tackle this myriad of schooling problems!

One argument doing the rounds is that ‘no country currently spends more on education proportionally than South Africa’ and that the answer is not to increase the national budget but to ‘first improve how the current budget is managed’.

As the APF, we do not dispute the need for far greater accountability for how the current education budget is used.   It is cynical however, to compare our own post-1994 developmental needs with those of countries with highly developed education infrastructures (developed over decades and even centuries!) be they first or even third world countries. In South Africa we are supposedly trying to rebuild an utterly bankrupt education system that barely delivered any education to the majority of the country throughout the twentieth century!

The national budget that emerges from GEAR gives education a portion of money that cannot redress the past and cannot deliver an education system that will allow true equity and the development of an education base that will allow for the development of this region to its potential.

The DoE Review demonstrates the commitment of GEAR to ensure the implementation of government’s core policy of increasingly withdrawing from the ‘free market’ and shifting the responsibility for education, health, water, housing, energy, employment, etc. onto the private sector and poor households in particular. To decentralise the education budget within a GEAR policy framework is not to give local communities control over their quality of life, but is to offload the burden for education onto the poor. What is being reinforced through GEAR is the already existing apartheid-era educational inequalities.

Until this fundamental contradiction is addressed, any actions by any state departments, to engage government concerns over financing, will be smokescreens. Any supposed ‘efforts’ by government departments to rework their inadequate budgets will lead to demoralization of staff and growing government frustration. So-called ‘pro-poor ’ interventions will only tinker with the surface of the problems.

For the DoE to use this ‘closed-budget’ approach to dealing with the complexity and extent of the problems faced in government schools, they are simply recycling the problems.

‘Pro-poor’ funding realignment

The review’s core recommendation is to deepen its ‘pro-poor ’ approach to improving education funding while also giving increasing power to schools (encouraging the shift from being Section 20 to Section 21 schools) to decide how their funds are spent. The review itself acknowledges that ‘40% of the country can be considered poor in absolute terms’. Furthermore, Stats SA 2002 had as a key finding, that between 1995 and 2000, the average African household had a 19% fall in income while the average white household had a 15% increase in income.

The very schools that will be given a highly limited budget to then ensure that it is ‘pro-poor ’ are the very schools that are crying out that their budgets are consistently, drastically inadequate. They are already turning to the already squeezed communities they serve to ‘top-up’ their budgets through higher fees, hidden fees, etcetera. There is no chance that these funds really will be used to ensure that the very poorest get education, but every chance that the funds will be spent on keeping the school going (a new electricity card to reconnect for the last week/s of the month, etc.). This approach cannot bring about an equitable quality education system, but will further isolate the poor and continue apartheid education!