Eastern Cape schools head to court after education department slashes next year’s budget

Some of Makhanda’s poorest schools, including former Model C schools, will be heading to court after learning that the Eastern Cape Department of Education will be withholding 33.75% of their budgets for next year. 

The department has not indicated what this money will be used for.

Education department spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima said that as the case was now before court, he could not discuss it. He did, however, confirm the decision to withhold funds.

The legal action comes after MEC for Finance Mlungisi Mvoko on Thursday announced a deep cut of hundreds of millions of rands in conditional grants for the Department of Education.

According to the medium-term budget, announced on Thursday, the education department will lose R247-million in conditional grants from the National Department of Education, as the National Treasury implements severe austerity measures. Of this amount, R228-million was cut from the school infrastructure grant.

“More than half of all dilapidated school buildings in the country are in the Eastern Cape, yet over the past five financial years, the Department of Education has returned over R1.2-billion in infrastructure funding to the Treasury because it failed to spend the money,” DA chief whip in the province’s legislature, Bobby Stevenson, said on Thursday.

Apart from KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape provides the smallest allocation per learner at only R1,061. Education norms and standards for learner education are R1,602 and this is being paid by all other provinces with the exception of the Free State (R1,212 and KwaZulu-Natal at R955).

Read more in Daily Maverick: SA schools still plagued by ‘historical infrastructure backlogs’, overcrowding – Equal Education report

“It leaves vulnerable, mostly poor black learners in the Eastern Cape to continue to suffer the indignity of discrimination,” the programme manager at the Makhanda Circle of Unity, Sisesakhe Ntlabezo, said in his founding affidavit.

The school governing bodies (SGB) going to court are from Ntsika Senior Secondary, Hoërskool PJ Olivier and Tantyi Primary School, but the court’s decision will apply universally to schools in the Eastern Cape.

According to papers before the Eastern Cape High Court sitting in Makhanda, the SGBs have asked for the decision to withhold 33.75% of the budget to be set aside and declared as unconstitutional, unlawful and invalid, but also for a court order that the department must report on the steps that will be undertaken to comply with national norms and standards every three months for the next year. 

“The South African basic education system is in an unacceptable state,” Ntlabezo said. 

“Few provinces suffer from the effects of the apartheid system as gravely as the Eastern Cape. Some 27 years after the adoption of the Constitution, the Eastern Cape is still regarded as one of the poorest and most under-resourced provinces in South Africa.

“Despite the dire need in the province, the Eastern Cape Department of Education has since 2020 drastically reduced the amount of funding allocated to ordinary public schools across the Eastern Cape,” he said.

“Without an adequate school allocation, a no-fee public school has no hope of ensuring that learners are provided with equal and quality basic education,” he continued.

He said 71.6% of schools in the province were no-fee schools and “entirely reliant on state funding to provide the essential inputs necessary to ensure the realisation of the rights of learners at those schools”.

He said the learner allocation was used by schools to buy necessities like textbooks, stationery, cleaning supplies and toilet paper, and for municipal bills, maintenance and upkeep of the school buildings, grounds and fences.

Ntlabezo said the department had neither consulted schools nor provided an explanation.

He said there had been a consistent pattern since 2020 to cut school budgets and despite lawyers asking for an explanation for the “drastic failure to meet targets set in the norms and standards”, there had been no response from the department.

He said schools received a memorandum only on 25 January 2023 stating that the reason for budget cuts was because they “had to bail out certain schools’ municipal accounts”.

Ntlabezo said the paper budgets sent to the schools were “fiction”.

“It allows the Eastern Cape Department of Education to say that it is funding 100% of the per learner targets (as set by the norms and standards” when it is merely providing substantially less,” he said.

He said the impact of the reduction on schools was devastating. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: Eastern Cape parents bent on pursuing legal battle against education department over chronically overcrowded schools

At Ntsika Senior Secondary School, SGB member Xolisile Tyotha said they would not be able to afford their municipal rates and taxes, and that they already owed R259,037.

“We simply will not receive enough funding to pay for the most basic services,” she said.

She said most learners at the school did not have a textbook for every subject and the school would need R637,000 to address the issue. As the school was in the poorest area in Makhanda, the parents were unable to contribute much. 

Boniswa Tyota from Tantyi Primary School said the new budgets would “devastate their school financially”.

She said 80% of the parents in the school were unemployed, and the school already required parents to buy toilet paper and copy paper. 

“The principal is paying for red pens for the teachers and blue pens for the learners. She also bought the padlocks and keys,” she said. 

This school too is in arrears, with R181,000 outstanding on its municipal bill, and will not be able to afford to get it current.

PJ Olivier Hoërskool also indicated that while it was a fee-paying school, 53% of their students qualified for fee alleviation, but the department had not paid their rebate. They too were in arrears with their municipal account and unable to fix the school fence. This has led to multiple break-ins and theft of copper pipes and water pumps at the school.

“It is entirely unclear what the department intends to do with the money that it will retain,” Ntlebezo said.

The effect, he said, would be the perpetuation of existing patterns of inequality among the provinces. DM