INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS
Photo: Matthews Baloyi
Education stakeholders are again calling for the controversial quintile ranking system, which they say has resulted in thousands of KwaZulu-Natal primary school pupils going hungry over December and January, to be reviewed.
According to the system, quintile one schools are in the poorest areas and generally have inadequate resources and infrastructure.
At the other end of the scale, quintile five schools are in affluent areas and have better facilities. The lower the quintile, the more financial support a school receives.
While the National School Nutrition Programme has a dedicated budget to feed pupils in schools from quintile one to three for 12 months of the year – at R2.15 a head a day – it uses money left over from other budgets to feed children in the higher quintiles.
However, there is only enough money to do so for 10 months, meaning that children in quintiles four and five went hungry in December and January on those days when school was open.
More than 600 primary schools in quintile four and more than 400 in quintile five depend on the scheme.
Yesterday stakeholders argued that even one day was too long for a child to go hungry, calling the situation “unacceptable” and “unconscionable”. They again argued that many schools were incorrectly ranked because the system failed to use the socio-economic status of a school’s population as a determining factor.
Earlier this month, the Westville Methodist Church wrote to The Mercury, appealing for food donations for the Kranskloof Primary School at KwaDabeka in the Pinetown school district. Although the school is classified quintile four – because it has electricity, running water and tarred roads leading to it – some of its pupils are orphaned and are the heads of their households.
Challenged
The church has stepped in to feed pupils, but can only do so twice a week. The school has more than 700 pupils, but in the interim only the neediest 300 are fed. It is often the only meal the children will have all day.
Reginald Chiliza, chairman of the Association of School Governing Bodies of KZN, said the quintile system should be challenged.
“There are a lot of informal settlements in KwaDabeka. For a school in that area to be ranked quintile four means that something is seriously wrong with the system,” he said.
Trevor Bennison, KZN head of the Governing Body Foundation, agreed that the system needed “reviewing”.
“Schools in certain areas have changes in their pupil populations (registering more poor pupils over the years) but are still classified as affluent schools due to physical characteristics. If a school qualifies for the feeding scheme, it should be for the whole school year. Even one day (without food) is unacceptable,” he said.
In KZN, the government’s nutrition programme provides for one hot meal a day, usually a protein such as sugar bean curry, pilchard stew or soya mince; a starch such as pap or rice; and a vegetable – except on Mondays, when fruit replaces the vegetable.
KZN Education Department spokeswoman Mbali Thusi said yesterday that while the department was aware of the problems with the system, it was a national policy that it had to follow.
She said that the national department was working on ways to remedy the situation.
A spokesman for the Department of Basic Education, Panyaza Lesufi, said that a policy document was doing the rounds among stakeholders for comment.
Last year, the department said that the quintile system would be dumped by April 2012 and replaced with two categories: fee-paying and non-fee-paying schools.
