Schools in the Eastern Cape say that since 2020 the provincial education department has been funding them well under the minimum per-pupil allocation prescribed by the national basic education minister.
It’s all quite odd, because until 2020 it paid the schools exactly the amount prescribed.
The formula is simple. If a school has 100 pupils and the national basic education minister declares the minimum per-pupil allocation is R1,600, then the department must pay that school R160,000. This is all for non-personnel expenses.
The importance of this funding lies in the fact that more than 70% of Eastern Cape pupils attend no-fee-paying schools.
In other words, these are schools in poor areas that may not raise funds via school fees. Their annual minimum allocation is their entire budget.
But since 2020, the Eastern Cape education department has paid an increasingly lower percentage of the allocation it should pay.
In the 2020/2021 financial year, it paid out 78%, or R1,204, of the minimum prescribed amount of R1,544 per pupil. This had to do with PPE procurement, so understandable.
But it paid less the following year and by the 2024/2025 financial year the department paid just 50%, or R815 per pupil, instead of the R1,627.
The shortfall for the 5,000-plus schools over the past five years runs into billions of rands.
To be clear, it affects all schools in all quintiles but, obviously, the poorest schools are worst affected.
And so, instead of meeting the constitutional mandate to create a more equitable education system, it seems the Eastern Cape is going backwards.
Poor schools are without doubt now worse off than they were five years ago, creating greater inequality in the system.
The department does not deny that it has paid less.
Its explanation seems to hide in its claims that its own budget from national is inadequate, that it had to bail out a “few schools” that didn’t pay their municipal accounts and that LSM procurement was centralised.
But national minister Siviwe Gwarube has not seen fit to add her voice to this court battle and she provided no confirming affidavit to acting provincial HOD Sharon Maasdorp’s reasoning.
The department, therefore, cannot claim to have the minister’s support.
In fact, the national department not so long ago warned that “disparities in funding of schools in provinces contribute to the inequalities of education provisioning in the country”.
It will be an interesting court case which tests how much flexibility provincial departments have in terms of per-pupil funding.
Whatever the outcome, it seems clear that Eastern Cape schools are not thriving and the department must come up with solutions to reverse this trend.
Daily Dispatch
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