Abstract
This chapter frames the discussion of inequality in South African schooling by providing an overview of key features of the country’s education system. Documenting the differences in educational outcomes across five different datasets and multiple dimensions of inequality (race, fees, school-status, province and quintile) illustrates that educational opportunity in South Africa is primarily a function of the colour of a child’s skin, the province of their birth, and the wealth of their parents. The chapter highlights the strategic ways that the minority of fee-charging schools exclude children who cannot pay fees, notably by using feeder zones, language policies and discriminatory admissions interviews. While there have been some important improvements in educational outcomes (primarily between 2003 and 2011), systematic declines in real per-learner expenditure since 2011 have undermined progress subsequently. The distinction between the need for more ‘business as usual’ resources and more ‘targeted’ resources is foregrounded. The chapter concludes that South Africa’s current trajectory is not the only path out of stubbornly high and problematically patterned inequality. A more equitable system will have to address the development and distribution of teachers in no-fee schools, and who has access to the functional fee-charging part of the schooling system.
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- 1.
This is based on my own calculations on the Matric 2018 National Senior Certificate data (i.e. it does not include IEB candidates, but does include Independent schools that write the NSC). ‘Top’ here is defined as the largest number of mathematics distinctions (80%+). In all of these schools there are at least six mathematics distinctions per school. Note that 19 of the 200 schools are independent schools writing the NSC exam. This analysis of Matric 2018 data is an extended analysis of a previous RESEP project analyzing this dataset for Tshikululu Social Investments for the “Maths Challenge” project.
- 2.
It is worth briefly situating the two school systems within a broader South African context. Recent scholarship points to five ‘social strata’ in South Africa with drastically different expenditure per-person-per-month (pppm) and probabilities of entering and leaving poverty (Schotte et al. 2018). On the one hand, one has the Chronic Poor (49% of society, R400 pppm ), the Transient Poor (13% of society, R600 pppm), and the Vulnerable (14% of society, R2,000 pppm) who constitute the second tier of society (together about 70–75%). On the other hand one has the Middle Class (20% of society, R4,000 pppm), and the Elite (4% of society and R19,300 pppm) making up the upper tier of society. White South Africans still make up two-thirds (65%) of the Elite (Schotte et al. 2018, p.98).
- 3.
This is based on the 156 former White-only schools (House of Assembly, HOA) included in the Verification ANA 2013 sample (Grades 3, 6 and 9).
- 4.
A ‘bachelor pass’ is the term used to describe the level of matric pass that allows a student to apply to university.
- 5.
‘Q’ here stands for ‘Quintile’. All public schools in South Africa are classified from Quintile 1–5 with Quintile 1 being the poorest category and Quintile 5 being the wealthiest.
- 6.
As Gustafsson (2018a) notes, “An unpublished report from the 2009 Funding and Management Survey (FAMS) study provides figures indicating that around 20% of fees charged in the public system are not collected, with around half of the gap being due to formal fee exemptions, and the other half simple non-payment of fees due. According to the General Household Survey of 2016, only 0.3% of learners ‘get a fee exemption’, meaning they are in a fee-charging school but due to household circumstances are exempt from payment.”
- 7.
Here the Constitutional Court judgement (Head of Department vs. Hoorskool Ermelo 2010, p.52) ruled that while children do have a right to receive a basic education in the language of their choice, this is only available when it is ‘reasonably practicable’ which depends on a variety of ‘context-sensitive’ factors including the “availability of and accessibility to public schools, their enrolment levels, the medium of instruction of the school…[and] the language choices the learners and their parents make”. See Stein (2017) for a full discussion.
- 8.
For a discussion of comparability issues related to SACMEQ 2007 and 2013 results, and for a detailed discussion of the re-scaling procedures undertaken by PIRLS to make prePIRLS and PILRS Literacy scores comparable see Spaull and Pretorius (2019) in the current volume.
- 9.
To be specific it calculates the difference in test scores between the start and end of the period and expresses them as a percentage of the standard deviation of the earlier period. This is converted into ‘years of learning’ using 0,3 standard deviations being equivalent to 1 year of school (see Spaull and Kotze 2015, p. 20). The gray sections in the table below the graph indicate that there was no improvement in learning outcomes over that period. For SACMEQ 2007–2013 we use the classical test scores and standard deviation reported in Van der Berg and Gustafsson (2019) in the present volume rather than the Item Response Theory scores due to the psychometric concerns with the IRT scores discussed in Spaull and Pretorius (2019).
- 10.
This analysis of DBE’s V-ANA 2013 data was part of a larger project undertaken by RESEP in 2014/2015 as part of the Programme to Support Pro-Poor Policy Development (PSPPD) commissioned by the South African Presidency.
- 11.
The Funza Lushaka program is a bursary scheme offering funding to students studying to become teachers on condition that they study selected fields and work in selected government schools upon graduation.
- 12.
The cost for implementing the Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) coaching intervention is approximately R3-million per year per grade for 50 schools (Stephen Taylor, 2018; personal communication), suggesting that for 7500 primary schools (50% of primary schools in South Africa) for three grades (Grade 1–3) this would be about R1,3-billion per year.
- 13.
- 14.
This is based on Matric 2014 data for the Western Cape which has the most reliable fee data in the country (see Motala and Carel in the present volume). The exact statistic is that among schools charging more than R20,000 fees per year 81.8% of matrics receive bachelor passes compared to 31% among those charging less than R20,000 (including no-fee schools).
- 15.
This is based on my own calculations using Treasury’s Estimates of Public Revenue and Expenditure (EPRE) data which is available on their website.
- 16.
This demographic phenomenon has been confirmed by Home Affairs birth registration data as well as age-specific data in the Department of Basic Education’s Annual Survey of Schools (ASS) and the Learner Unit Record Information Tracking System (LURITS). The leading explanation is that the rise in births coincides with the roll out of Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. Thus larger cohorts of children have been moving through the schooling system, with the ‘surge’ reaching Grade 8 in 2018
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Spaull, N. (2019). Equity: A Price Too High to Pay?. In: Spaull, N., Jansen, J. (eds) South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Policy Implications of Research in Education, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_1
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