The authors of the Daily Maverick article, The vultures are circling South Africa’s starved education system, are right to assert that despite education being a public good, parents’ ability to pay is the main reason why some schools continue to perform much better than others.
We will only have an equal education system when all children can succeed, regardless of the wealth of their families.
The authors also rightly warn that a profit motive in education can create the wrong incentives, where the quality of education becomes less important than making money, although this risk is not borne out in the 98.5% pass rate obtained by independent schools in 2023.
The article cautions that the rapid growth of private schools “could lead to a cycle of decline in public education, eroding the quality of education available to the majority of South African children. While better-resourced private schools can offer higher-quality education, their proliferation risks creating a more fragmented and unequal society where access to quality education is not guaranteed by the state.”
Well, I have news for the authors: we’re there already. But it was apartheid in public schools, not the growth of private schools, that landed us in this mess.
The steep social gradient of school achievement characterises the public education sector itself, with former model C (white) schools charging school fees up to three times the total spending on a child attending a no-fee school – and doing almost three times as well.
The state will never be able to compensate for the differential wealth of parents, but its constitutional obligation is to ensure the right to basic education as a public good, where market failure exists. Income disparity in South Africa is so great that there is no viable commercial market for education among the poorer half of the population.
Roughly half of all South Africa’s people, including nearly 70% of its children, live below the official “upper-bound poverty line” of R1,634 per month, which means that they don’t even have enough money for the most basic necessities of life.
That is why the Department of Basic Education has designated 60% of schools as no-fee schools, and why it has a pro-poor sliding scale in the allocation of funding for learner support material.
For the same reason, there is no interest from commercial operators in the poorest 50% of schools. Even if you were to cut corners, there is simply no profit to be made.
In the Western Cape in 2021/2, total public spending per learner in secondary schools in quintiles 1 to 3 (the poorest) was R20,709. On average, parents paid an extra R10,690 in school fees in fee-paying (quintile 4 and 5) secondary schools. The lowest fee offered by a network of private schools – SPARK schools – is R36,000 per child per annum for 2025.
In other words, if government were to procure the services of a commercial provider, it would have to offer a premium of 80% above their current per capita allocation (PAEPL) in public schools. This is not going to happen, neither in good times nor in lean.
Non-profit school operators
What is happening is the re-emergence of non-profit school operators who secure community and donor funding to top up government funding in no-fee schools.
For example, the people of Bonnievale in the Western Cape got together to build their own no-fee, non-profit public school. It receives its fair share of public funding and continues to raise money from the local community and private donors for its operations.
The same happens in Struisbaai in the Overberg, and several other communities are planning similar initiatives. These schools operate within the legal framework of Collaboration Schools.
Contrary to the assertion that they undermine parents’ democratic rights through a 50-50 voting arrangement on the school governing body (SGB) – 50% staff and parents and 50% school operating partner – parents hold the ultimate power. If they choose, they can simply vote the school operator out.
It’s hard to understand why this arrangement is any less democratic than the current structure of SGBs provided for in the South African Schools Act, which is not perfect either, lending itself to “school capture” by corrupt factions in resource-poor communities.
What is needed is greater capacity and accountability within SGBs and a rebalancing of conclusive power towards the entire parent body. In the Western Cape, this is what Collaboration Schools try to achieve.
South Africa has a long history of non-profit, non-government provision of education. Think of the mission schools like Clarkebury and Healdtown, which produced leaders like Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba. Their history may be contested, but they played a pivotal role in the Struggle for liberation.
Intemperate
Even today, many faith-based organisations continue to operate schools serving the poorest communities. To equate them with for-profit enterprises – and compare them to vultures – seems a little intemperate. They are non-profit organisations just like Equal Education (EE) whose researchers co-authored the op-ed in question.
They are as affronted as EE would be by the suggestion that they only exist to make money. That is patently false and absurd, and it is time that Equal Education stops fudging the debate by tarring all private stakeholders in education with the same brush.
The notion that public goods must always be provided by government employees is simply not true. Public goods like education and healthcare inevitably require government funding for those who are unable to pay, but these services can be rendered by either government or private providers.
This is the premise of the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, which is supported by trade unions like Sadtu. That scheme seeks to harness the expertise of the private sector to provide healthcare to those who can’t afford it, because healthcare is a public good.
Similarly, our Constitution requires the state to ensure the right to basic education, but it doesn’t require teachers to be employed by the state.
Across the country, the realisation of that right is unfolding with the profile and pace of a snail. The quality curve of education resembles its shape, with about 20% of public schools constituting the head of the snail and the other 80% trailing behind in the shell. They are divided by a long neck, with school results in the lower four quintiles all substantially poorer than the top quintile.
There has been some improvement over the past 30 years, but far too slowly to build the human capital needed to reduce unemployment and drive economic growth. The shape of the quality curve hasn’t changed because both no-fee and fee-paying schools get the same percentage increase to pay for teachers’ salaries, which quintile 4 and 5 schools then augment with higher school fees.
Not just about money
However, the problem is not just about money. South Africa spends 6.6% of its GDP on education – the 11th-highest allocation in the world (excluding small island states).
Yet our educational outcomes are poor relative to many countries that spend a lot less. Even though our children spend an average of 10.2 years in school, their effective years of schooling (calculated from learning outcomes achieved relative to other countries) – is only 5.6.
That means that almost half of our children’s schooling is wasted.
Servaas van der Berg and others at the University of Stellenbosch estimated that the cost of re-teaching children who had failed their grade was R20-billion in 2018 prices — that’s about 8% of the annual budget for basic education. Wave 5 of the National Income Dynamics Survey, conducted in 2017, found that more than half of 15-30-year-olds had repeated at least one year. That’s an awful waste of resources.
Major reset
What is needed is a major reset of the basic education system, but that reset is not going to come from more public funding for schooling. Government spending needs to be reprioritised towards better educational outcomes, but most of the new money should be directed to improved nutrition and expanded early learning programmes because providing young children with enough food and brain stimulation will be the real game changers.
After all, our biggest challenge is not the ability of teachers to teach, but the ability of learners to learn.
The harsh reality is that public schooling is going to have to make do with what it’s already got – at least in terms of public resources. Top-down support must continue – better provincial and district management and enough opportunities for training and development.
But we know that won’t be enough. Apartheid has left communities so under-capacitated, so marginalised, that vicious cycles of under-resourcing and underperformance of schools just keep playing out. What is needed is local, school-by-school, transformation, and that could come from two sources.
The first is communities themselves through the reactivation of street-committee structures, mobilising for education. As in Bonnievale and Struisbaai, local communities need to come together behind the future of their children.
The second is non-government resources in the form of civil society organisations and private funders that can harness a wider set of technical and financial assets than would otherwise be available to poorer communities.
Public school partnerships involving non-profit school operators have shown the benefits for children. While several schools have opted out of Collaboration Schools, those that have remained have shown an average 9.7 percentage point improvement compared with the provincial average.
Two of the three high schools in the Western Cape now have pass rates exceeding 90%. In participating schools in the Eastern Cape, early-grade reading results show that the number of learners on track is now 20% higher than the national average. The two high schools now have National Senior Certificate pass rates higher than 80%, with fewer learners dropping out. This is double the pass rate at the commencement of the partnerships.
Ultimately, this is what counts – that the poorest children can achieve results that were previously attainable only in wealthier schools. This should be the yardstick for equal education, not whether all teachers are employed by the state.
David Harrison is CEO of the DG Murray Trust (DGMT), one of the funders of Public Schools Partnerships.
The Daily Maverick originally published this op-ed on 21 October 2024. Access it here.
