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School fees to remain intact
03/03/2003 18:48 - (SA)
Pretoria - Capping of school fees set by richer public schools or scrapping them for poorer ones should not be considered, according to a report released on Monday.
"We've thought about capping. I don't think it is possible," education minister Kader Asmal said at a news conference in Pretoria.
It would be difficult to supervise such a measure, he said.
On banning school fees for poor schools, the report says: "Schools and provincial education departments have argued strongly that school fees serve an important accountability function.
"When parents contribute to the resourcing of a school, even if it is as low as 0.5% of total expenditure, parents are a lot more motivated to monitor management and efficiency in the school..."
According to the report, 85% of parents find school fees reasonable, but only 58% actually pay them.
It recommends the elimination of so-called hidden fees - demands by schools for parents to make monetary or in-kind contributions over and above the officially determined school fees, for instance for excursions or stationery.
Hidden fees amount to 25% of the official fees, it says.
Illegal
"Monetary contributions over and above the school fee that are not channelled through the school fund, are clearly illegal."
Since all school fees should be set at an annual general meeting of the parents, any fee-setting outside this is illegal, according to the report.
"The cost of having hidden fees in the system, as opposed to having all charges incorporated in the legally determined school fee, is that school accountability for resource utilisation is diluted."
Hidden fees are unpredictable, the document says.
"The effectiveness of the exemption process is also affected."
Parents could be exempt from a fee, but not from a demand to provide additional stationery.
The report proposes stronger action, including prosecution or disciplinary action, against principals, school governing bodies and individuals who do not comply with the procedures for fee exemptions and fee-setting.
It recommends encouraging parents to participate in the fee-setting process, and ensuring better availability of information about the fee exemption system.
In the current exemption system, the school principal and the school governing bodies are both player and referee, the report says.
Uniforms
"The Department of Education should assess whether the eligibility for a child support grant could automatically qualify a household for an exemption from the payment of school fees."
It should also aim to reduce the need for exemptions by raising the government allocation to poor schools.
Asmal expressed support for a recommendation for a national benchmark to ensure that the poorest cohort of pupils in each province get the same government allocation, thereby eliminating provincial disparities.
According to the report, a school uniform costs between R700 and R2 000, twice as much as it would have cost had the market worked well.
While encouraging the need for uniforms, it condemns the monopolies on the supply of school uniforms.
The department should insist that the specifications for uniforms be such that parents could buy them at competitive prices, or produce them at home, the document says.
"Long-term considerations should begin to influence current work in so far as the possible introduction of an inexpensive standard uniform is concerned."
The report suggests that the department play a stronger role in influencing textbook demand and supply.
"Options such as a nationally determined core set of books should not be excluded."
The text book retrieval rates - estimated at 40 to 50% in 1999 - should be improved, it says.
Deputy director-general Bobby Soobrayan told reporters that textbook losses cost about R300m a year, the equivalent of 100 school buildings.
Water, electricity
Wasteful use of water and electricity in schools is rife.
One of the options it proposes is the installation of pay-as-you-go electricity meters in schools and the issuing of recharge vouchers on a monthly basis. Over-consuming schools will then have to find money somewhere else if they run out of electricity, or do without until they get their next allocation.
Echoing the report, Asmal condemned officials who failed in their duty. "Some parts of the education bureaucracy have been woefully unable to convert available funding in budgets into resources for schools."
The minister said he was very keen on a proposal for a budget monitoring and support office in his department.
Asmal said the report showed that measures of inequality for most aspects of education provision were much more favourable than the index of inequality for income in the country.
The report, however, also says: "The quality of the education that the enrolled youth receive, is, on average, quite low, and worse, very unequally distributed...
"There is considerable evidence indicating that quality of education in South African schools is worryingly low relative to what South Africa spends on schooling."
- SAPA
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