Human tragedy behind the school placements crisis

The familiar crisis of school placements, particularly in Gauteng, brings into sharp focus the major tensions in our education system.

By yesterday morning some 40,000 pupils in Gauteng were yet to find a place in a school, and other provinces also face problems.

But beyond the numbers this is a human tragedy in a country whose constitution guarantees access to education - as frustrated parents told us yesterday as they battled to find places for their children.

The story of Johannesburg mother Lerato Motloung is painful. She broke down in tears telling how she had been forced to send her daughter to a private school for two years because there was no place for her in the state system. The crippling cost is now unbearable.

What is to be done? Obviously more schools need to be built.

A report commissioned by the Centre for Child Law into spending on new school construction showed that Gauteng had spent only R400-million on new schools over three years, despite promising the Constitutional Court that R1.7-billion would be spent.

This is among the causes of the crisis we face, but it's not the whole story either.

Gauteng, which claims to be building a new school every month, simply cannot keep pace with demand - which it says sees 80000 new pupils coming into the system each year.

This is driven partly by internal migration based on perceptions of differences in education quality from region to region.

But the backlog in schools is also a symptom of how our education spending is allocated, as Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi argues - a view with which we have some sympathy.

In the past financial year R229-billion was allocated to basic education, the largest single item in the fiscus. Yet almost 90% of that goes on salaries and services, leaving comparatively little to be spent on building new schools, which of course have to be staffed and serviced.

It's an intractable situation that offers no obvious solution.