By Daanyaal Matthews
The Western Cape province has consistently faced the issue of learner placement, with the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) reporting earlier this year that they had received 32 000 late applications, leading to some learners only being placed towards the end of the first term.
Researcher Lisa Draga has argued that the issue of admissions can be seen in the ‘feeder school zones’, a program that disproportionally benefits learner applications dependent on where the student resides. For Draga, this could result in situations wherein poorer communities are disproportionately disadvantaged.
“Whether it be consciously or unconsciously, it was a case of feeder zones being designed wherein improved black areas, even when they fall close to a school, are being excluded from that school.”
These concerns of exclusion have long been theorized in the Western Cape, especially when evaluating the differences between ‘former model C schools’—schools that were once only available to white students—and other schools, especially non-fee-paying schools in the Cape Flats, with Draga agreeing with the idea of exclusion being, in certain circumstances, deliberate.
“That manipulation is absolutely playing itself out within the system. Schools’ admission by its nature lends itself to easy manipulation when rejecting learners. In fact, one of the cases that I encountered in one of the Rondebosch schools was where one of the learners was rejected because they did not fall within the feeder zones, but when the father had made the application, the father had indicated that they could not pay the school fees and asked for a fee exemption, which parents are entitled to ask for under the regulations. But, because the parents requested a fee exemption, what we see is that feeder zones and fee exemptions are being used to manipulate the system to avoid poor learners from accessing schools,” argues the researcher.
The Bela Act, which was recently signed in, aimed to standardise the operations of schools within the Republic by providing departments with more oversight over school governing bodies and intervening in the admissions process. The act, however, while being introduced, has seen its full implementation delayed, with clauses four and five of the Act suspended for three months to allow for parties to deliberate on issues and make further proposals.
Draga contents that these ‘concerns’ don’t make constitutional sense given that the act and the clauses suspended reflect the Republic’s constitution in crafting an equitable education system.
“The courts have said things like when governing bodies are designing these [admission] policies, they need to keep the best interests of learners into account that these prestigious schools are not islands onto themselves, but they are a public resource, and their obligation is to the public. That their admissions policies should reflect considerations of equity and equality; so, this is nothing controversial, as the courts have already stated, but it seems that when it comes to composing it and putting it into law, there’s been this predicably huge backlash against seeing these things reflect in the BELA legislation itself,” said Draga.
