- The Foundation was invited to address the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education concerning the matter, and did so towards the end of the year in a nationally televised session in the Houses of Parliament. Wereceived positive feedback on our inputs, but this matter has not yet reached finality.
- 2.3 #HairMustFall and all that
- University students' calls for the "decolonisation" and "Africanization ' of education had, by mid -year, begun to be transferred to a small number of high-profile schools, hardly surprisingly all of which were situated in close proximity to our universities. Was it coincidental that these schools were also all situated in cities which were politically controlled by opposition parties after the August 2016 local government elections?
- In schools, the rallying points for the disaffected were language, conduct and grooming regulations which black African learners in particular, experienced as colonialist, racist and anti-Africanist. Schools have generally responded sensibly and maturely after the initial shock, but again it did nothing for the general image of public education. Many schools are currently undertaking reviews of their codes of conduct and general approaches, and we have provided several leads in this area
- 2.4 #FeesMustFall
- This was the second major arena in which we experienced some knock-on effect from tertiary to secondary and even primary education. For the first time ever in our experience we saw the parent groupings in several schools refusing to approve the budget as presented to them by the governing body, and in a greater number of schools there appeared to be a far deeper interrogation of the processes of budgeting; the amounts budgeted for various projects, undertakings or cost centres in the school; and subsequent fee levels arrived at. The schooling sector can probably take some comfort from the fact that our fee-paying schools have for almost a quarter of a century being working according to the broad model now being proposed for tertiary education - free education for the poor, reduced contributions from the middle class and almost punitively high fees for the wealthy. Our sector must, however, be getting very close to the tipping point where families in really significant numbers begin to side with the view that the gap between the most expensive public schools and schools in the independent sector has shrunk sufficiently to allow them to at least consider a move to "private" education. As indicated above, we believe that this will be a major blow to public education in this country, and that it is something which we need to work really hard at avoiding. It will take innovative budgeting from SGBs, careful prioritisation by management, and a willingness, in the shorter term at least, to do with out some of the "gingerbread items' that the wealthier schools have come to regard as imperatives.
- 2.5 Admissions and related matters in Gauteng
- May 2016 saw the Constitutional Court deliver a final judgement on the long-festering issue of the admissions policy of the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE), crafted in response to the Rivonia Primary School court challenges of 2011 and 2012. The judgment handed the MEC for Education and the Head of Education in Gauteng greater powers than they had previously been understood to enjoy, and at the same time ordered that ' feeder zones ' for schools be set by the Department, in consultation with governing body associations, within 12 months. The Foundation has made carefully- considered inputs into the process and we await, with considerable interest and some trepidation, the response from provincial Ministry.
- Amid the political-legal confrontations, the GDE made a second attempt to implement an electronic, online application system for the process of applying for admission to the province's schools. The launch was plagued by any number of logistical and teething problems, and by the opening of the 2017 school year, there were still somewhere between 45 000 and 135 000 learners unplaced, depending on who was issuing the figures. The ramifications of this still need to play themselves out, but at the time of writing it remained another arena where an ultimate verdict on the system will have to await the finalisation of answers to the problem. The provincial administration has in the meantime, hailed the system as a major success.
- Contrary to the fears and expectations of many, the confrontation so prevalent in Gauteng and the solutions favoured by that province' s politicians have not found any great favour elsewhere. We see this as a positive and are hopeful that good sense and reasonableness will eventually prevail in this fraught area of education administration.