By The People

Many poor parents across the country are finding it impossible to get their children into State schools. Sometimes it is because they can’t afford the various costs associated with sending a child to school. Quite often, however, it is because all the schools in the immediate vicinity are already tightly packed.

The obvious answer for many parents has been to set up their own schools. Most often this amounts to one unemployed or retired teacher, with children crammed into a crumbling building or under a tree.

In the informal settlement of Sunrise Park near Rustenburg in the North West province, 298 children who were refused entry into the nearby Paardekraal Secondary School are now taught in a dilapidated Zionist church. The Phuthaditjaba Community Development School has only one room, the roof leaks, and the windows are broken, but the unpaid teachers are driven to continue in the knowledge that without their efforts, the children would be getting no education at all.

Sometimes these unofficial schools have, despite the precariousness of their existence, managed to procure the facilities and resources to teach properly. The Peoples’ Power Secondary School in Khayelitsha near Cape Town, for example, provides an education to 1 800 students who have been excluded from other schools.

The school operates out of the Andile Nhose Community Centre, so it has access to reasonable facilities and the children are at least not exposed to the wind and rain. It has also benefited from donations of computers and other equipment. The 18 teachers, however, have received no payment since the school opened at the beginning of the year.

Like most of these parent-initiated schools, neither the Peoples’ Power Secondary School nor the Phuthaditjaba Community Development School is registered. This is not for want of trying; both have made numerous attempts to become formally recognized. But the response from the authorities has been far from enthusiastic. Both of these schools have been told that they will not be registered and the children must be accommodated elsewhere. Exactly where, nobody is saying.

In fact, the biggest hurdle facing these self-starter schools is not finding teachers or pupils or premises, but obtaining that piece of paper that gives them official sanction to operate.

It is up to provinces to determine the requirements for registration as an independent school, or to make a non-public school a public one. The requirements tend to be fairly rigorous on issues like having formal premises, which makes it enormously difficult for a group of poor township parents, for example, to comply.

Obviously there is a big enough problem with fly-by-night schools that education departments must be cautious about registering schools with no record. But the example of these two schools shows us that, amongst the scoundrels, there are many constructive and genuine efforts.

It is also clear that laws governing the setting up of independent or state-aided schools and the officials who enforce them tend to assume villainry, rather than looking at the specifics of the case.

These two schools, battling against the odds to give education to children who would otherwise be on the streets, show that it is time for an overhaul of laws and attitudes. South Africa will solve its education problem not through officialdom, but through the multiplier effect of countless individual initiatives by ordinary South Africans.