A human rights organisation has issued a letter of demand to the Eastern Cape education department, after it drastically cut funding to schools attended by the poorest pupils in the province.
The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in Makhanda has asked acting head of department Mahlubandile Qwase to provide full details and evidence of the steps they are taking “to support schools, for this financial year, that are unable to provide education to pupils due to a lack of funding”.
In a 10-page letter dated May 31, Cecile van Schalkwyk, an attorney at the LRC, demanded that the department provide, within 20 days of the date of the document, detailed reasons for the reduction in the funding to schools for 2020, 2021 and 2022 financial years.
According to the letter, each pupil in the province who is attending a quintile 1-3 school (school in the poorest community) was allocated R815 per year, while the national norms and standards for school funding stipulates an amount of R1,536.
However, responses from the province’s education MEC, Fundile Gade, to questions from the DA indicated that each child attending quintile 1-3 schools will be receiving R983, which is still well below the R1,536 target.
It widens the inequalities in the provisioning of education in the different provinces and reinforces the very legacy of inequality that the entire constitutional and statutory framework is designed to undo.
— Legal Resources Centre attorney Cecile van Schalkwyk
The department has allocated R1.5bn in funding for more than 1.6-million pupils attending quintile 1-5 schools, which includes more than 1.5-million pupils who attend 4,854 quintile 1-3 schools.
Schools receive funding based on the number of pupils attending the institution.
The LRC indicated it was acting on behalf of the governing body of Ntsika Secondary School in Makhanda, and the school, and was also representing the interests of pupils and parents across the province.
Van Schalkwyk said the significant reduction in funding was “in contravention of the norms and standards for school funding and the national per learner targets”.
The budget allocated to schools is meant to cover, among other things, the purchase of textbooks, stationery, education consumables and municipal services.
“The reality is, with inadequate funding, the school cannot carry the burden of photocopies to make up for the lack of textbooks, cannot undertake critical maintenance at school and is not able to fully pay for municipal services.”
Earlier this year the LRC won a high court case forcing the department to supply top-up textbooks and stationery to schools after its failure to do so timeously.
Meanwhile, the letter stated that “the real shock” to schools came when they received their 2021/22 budget in which the norms and standards target was R1,466 but quintile 1-3 schools got R766.
Van Schalkwyk said the department’s decision to reduce the per pupil funding targets on a drastic scale has the opposite effect as “it further impoverishes poor and marginalised learners”.
“It widens the inequalities in the provisioning of education in the different provinces and reinforces the very legacy of inequality that the entire constitutional and statutory framework is designed to undo.”
She added: “Perversely, the province that has the poorest schools and is in need of the most educational resources is now receiving the least amount of money with no proper reasons provided and no mitigating attempts to address this inequality.
“The reduction appears also to have been decided unilaterally and without any consultation with governing bodies, principals, learners or parents.”
Van Schalkwyk warned the department that if it failed to respond to the demands, “we hold instructions to launch high court proceedings to declare the department’s reductions of per pupil payments unconstitutional and invalid”.
A principal of a quintile 1 school that has more than 1,600 pupils, said schools “were being robbed of their norms and standards through lack of funding”.
“We are battling with a shortage of textbooks and the budget we are getting is a drop in the ocean.”
He said it cost his school R9,000 a month to buy duplicating paper to make copies for pupils because of the textbook shortage.
Describing the funding crisis as “a national disaster”, Jaco Deacon, CEO of the Federation of Governing Bodies of SA Schools, said there was a need for urgent national intervention “to help those children whose constitutional rights are being trampled”.
“Poor pupils are getting a raw deal. The message that is being sent to pupils in Eastern Cape is ‘you don’t matter to us’.”
DA shadow MEC for education in the province Yusuf Cassim said the department believed that just R34 a year per pupil for maintenance was sufficient for schools “to maintain their collapsing infrastructure”.
“Most pupils in Eastern Cape remain without a textbook per subject. The LTSM [learning and teaching support materials] budget of R465 per pupil for the year will hardly solve this crisis, given that this amount must also pay for furniture and stationery.”
The Eastern Cape education department had not responded to media queries at the time of publication.
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