Ahead of today’s Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) presentation, education activists, Equal Education have called on Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana and the National Treasury to stop cutting funds for the basic education budget.
South Africa’s public schooling system still suffers from a lack of access to basic services such as water and sanitation, and overcrowded classrooms.
In a media statement released on Tuesday, the group wrote:
Equal Education (EE) demands that this MTBPS not just be business as usual, but that schools get the money needed to tackle the many challenges they experience.
Equal Education researcher Jane Borman, says that every day learners across the country face harsh inequalities and indignities at school, denying them their constitutional right to basic education.
“For instance, the latest Department of Basic Education (DBE) statistics show that 2 130 schools still have plain pit toilets as their only form of sanitation and 5 386 schools have an unreliable water supply.”
Earlier this year, the DBE gazetted changes to the regulations for the Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards law, changes that aim to remove all the deadlines for when schools must be provided with infrastructure.
Equal Education says that the DBE’s proposal to remove the measures that ensure that the school infrastructure crisis is dealt with urgently is alarming and concerning.
“It is mind blowing that the DBE and provincial education departments, while scrambling to ensure learners catch up on the significant learning losses, would also try and water down legislation that tries to fix these problems.”
Borman says that Covid-19 has highlighted the inequalities in the country’s schooling system,. Even after schools reopened for full-time teaching and learning, learners in under-resourced schools were not able to return to class every day, because their schools did not meet social distancing protocols and hygiene standards.
So, the importance of increase investment in basic education speaks for itself and cannot be emphasised enough.
The group says that more effort is also needed from national and provincial treasuries to ensure that the education departments not only have enough financial resources, but that those resources are managed well.
