Parents desperate to educate their kids

“THE most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform.”

These are the words echoed by 17-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, 10 years ago when Pakistan was embroiled in a war that saw a significant number of young girls being deprived access to education.

Twenty-something-odd years into a constitutional democracy in South Africa which is supposed to recognise an immediate right to basic education, Lindeka Sheyifa, a resident of Khayelitsha, still cries about the inability to access education.

“Nothing is as devastating as seeing other children enjoying the benefits of basic education while my child is sitting at home, not because of lack of effort on my part but because the department is simply refusing to admit my child to a school,” she laments.

Lindeka’s child is one of many children in the Western Cape who found themselves without a school at the beginning of the year despite the obligation in the South African Schools Act which requires MECs to ensure that there are sufficient school places in their provinces, and despite the duty placed on the HOD of the Education Department and on districts to assist learners with placement and to ensure that all learners of school-going age are in school.

Over the past two years, as candidate attorneys and attorneys working at the walk-in clinic at the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC), it has become a disheartening common sight for us to be approached by desperate and dejected parents and caregivers of learners in the Western Cape who remain unplaced at the beginning of each school calendar year.

Desperate parents are sent away or told to wait for 2023 while their children sit at home with no access to learning and to the many benefits of being inside a classroom. Benefits such as safety, psychosocial support and the National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP).

At times they are subjected to spending additional funds going to schools on the instruction of district officials, only for the schools to inform them that they do not appear on their lists and/or that the district should not have sent them there as they are full and, in fact, “oversubscribed”.

The story of Lindeka’s child is not hers alone, but is the story of hundreds of other similarly placed children, faced with the results of an ongoing pattern of conduct and systemic maladministration within the Metro East Education District. A pattern which exacerbates the exclusion experienced by vulnerable learners seeking to attend school and fulfil their right to basic education.

In 2021 alone, the Department of Basic Education and the WCED reported that there were about 23 953 learners who sought placement and remained unplaced at the beginning of the year. This failure to place learners can be attributed to, among other things, the WCED’s failure to carefully plan for learners who move to the Western Cape from the Eastern Cape. On May 4, 2021, the WCED reported that the growth in the number of learners from outside the province was 19 452. Parents often move to the Western Cape to pursue a better socio-economic standing and opportunities. Often due to issues such as abuse or the death of a caregiver, many children from the Eastern Cape are forced to follow their family’s breadwinners and relocate from the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape.

Sadly, the dreadful situation in 2021 More so, we are now nearing the end of the second term and there is still a substantial number of learners who still require placement in schools in the Western Cape, particularly in the Metro East. These learners are as young as 12 years old, yet they must watch their peers proudly wear their school uniforms while they remain at home without access to basic education. This comes because of the WCED’s failure to secure school placement for them.

The EELC has been engaging and pleading with Metro East District and the HOD to place Lindeka’s child and other similarly placed learners in schools in 2022.

The district director and HOD have statutory and policy obligations to ensure that all eligible learners are appropriately accommodated in schools, yet they have either refused or failed to meet these obligations and assist the parents who have been brought to their attention through numerous letters by the EELC. We have been forced to approach the Western Cape High Court because without appropriate intervention, the affected learners will continue to suffer the daily and ongoing deprivation of their constitutional right to basic education, their right to human dignity, their right to equality, and to have their best interests considered. We hope that through the litigation we will be able to gain both individualised and systemic relief.

The South African Constitution is often valorised and celebrated as the most progressive in the world and it guarantees everyone a right to basic education. That there are still learners who, at the end of the second school term, are still out of school, is a tale told by an idiot. The rudimentary step towards the attainment of basic education is accessing school. Clearly the WCED is failing to deliver even the most basic of needs to the group of learners who are “left behind”.