OPINIONISTA: Feeding frenzy — high school admissions and the 2019 election By Mike Wills
It’s only April but the die is already cast for 2020 school admissions. Applications are in and the wheels are turning to determine who will get prized Grade 8 places at elite government high schools across the country.
School admissions are subject to a multi-layered bureaucratic cake of Section 29 of the Constitution, the National Policy for Admission of Learners, provisions in the SA Schools Act and the various provincial education acts. Legally, the right of admission belongs to the head of the provincial education department and not to the school governing body.
Schools also, in theory, cannot reject anyone on ability to pay fees, which are now well over R30,000 a year in many instances. But if the principal admits too many pupils who cannot meet the fees, the school will rapidly slip in its ability to provide extra staff and decent facilities. So feeder schools become the self-regulator — if parents can afford the expensive primary in the privileged locality then they can probably afford the expensive high school in the same locality.
The ambitious Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi is the latest entrant into the fray with a regulation expanding Gauteng school feeder zones from the previous 5km radius to 30km. This could mean, for example, that Parktown Boys High’s feeder zone could encompass Centurion, Soweto, Roodepoort and Boksburg or roughly eight million people.
But feeder zones mean good schools can become closed shops, always replicating themselves and denying state-funded benefits to a broader community. To the champions of transformation, it’s effectively a form of Group Areas. My tuppence is that a narrowly defined local feeder zone is an essential component for a properly functioning state school. To scrap, or unnaturally broaden, the concept because of its ideological flaws would lead to the disastrous outcome of reducing the quality of good schools without a consequent improvement elsewhere.
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