{"id":258849,"date":"2023-05-02T15:13:40","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T13:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/for-years-learner-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools\/"},"modified":"2023-05-02T15:13:40","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T13:13:40","slug":"for-years-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/for-years-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"For years, subsidies have been withheld from poorest Eastern Cape schools"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/Graphics\/lisa_nelson\/school-outside-small.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/for-years-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Eastern Cape schools have for years been paid less than the allotted amount per learner. Graphic: Lisa Nelson<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>For years, almost two-thirds of the subsidy per learner has not been paid over to no-fee schools in the Eastern Cape by the provincial education department.<\/li>\n<li>Thousands of the province\u2019s no-fee schools have been crippled by budget cuts since 2020, with parents and teachers stumping up for basics such as toilet paper and stationery.<\/li>\n<li>Most school principals have been unaware they were being significantly short changed by the department.<\/li>\n<li>The R872.5-million in outstanding budgets are now promised to the schools after the Legal Resources Centre threatened to take the provincial department to court.<\/li>\n<li>It remains a mystery where the Eastern Cape Department of Education funding went, and how the department was suddenly able to find the money to plug the shortfall.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The poorest schools in the Eastern Cape are to receive an additional R872.5-million in learner subsidies after the Legal Resources Centre in Makhanda discovered they were being underfunded, and threatened the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDOE) with legal action.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/for-years-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>Following tip-offs from some school principals, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) found that no-fee schools were receiving less than half the funding they were supposed to get from the provincial department.<\/p>\n<p>The no-fee schools were entitled to receive a R1,602 subsidy per learner this financial year according to the National Norms and Standards set by the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDOE) budgeted a meagre 38% of the full subsidy, amounting to R608 per learner \u2013 R994 less per learner than they should receive.<\/p>\n<p>In May last year, the LRC began asking questions about the budget cuts, but repeated correspondence to the ECDOE went answered.<\/p>\n<p>LRC lawyer Cecile van Schalkwyk said the LRC then embarked on a nationwide road trip, visiting 95 urban and rural schools in all nine provinces. They discovered that the national per-learner budget targets were not being met in KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and, especially, the Eastern Cape.<\/p>\n<p>Alarmingly, none of the principals interviewed in the three under-funded provinces \u2013 apart from those in Makhanda \u2013 were aware of the R1,602 per learner subsidy set by Minister Motshekga, said van Schalkwyk.<\/p>\n<p>She said when the 2023\/2024 budgets were announced in November last year, the LRC decided on legal action.<\/p>\n<p>Acting on the instructions of the Makhanda Circle of Unity and three Makhanda schools, the LRC advised the ECDOE that reducing the budgets violated learners\u2019 rights to education, human dignity and equality, and discriminated against children in the province.<\/p>\n<p>Yet in January, the ECDOE sent a memorandum to schools advising them the budget cuts were being implemented due to financial constraints.<\/p>\n<p>The ECDOE then made an about-turn. At a principals\u2019 meeting in Gqeberha on 3 April, the department announced that revised budgets would be sent to schools. This decision was confirmed on 21 April by the ECDOE and it was announced that an additional R872.5 million had been made available.<\/p>\n<p>The first tranche of money for 2023\/24 is due in school bank accounts by the last week of May. However, the ECDOE has already failed to keep a promise to distribute revised budgets to schools in the week of 24-28 April, making it difficult for schools to plan.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"subheading\">Discriminatory funding<\/h2>\n<p>Van Schalkwyk said the ECDOE\u2019s decision would relieve the schools\u2019 immediate needs, but she was concerned the \u201cframing of the Norms and Standards for School Funding remains problematic\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>She said the norms allowed provincial education departments to deviate from the target set by the minister, \u201ccreating an unequal and discriminatory funding model, where some provinces fund below the target amount\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>This deviation had led to the Eastern Cape having below-target funding for the past three years, and there was no guarantee budgets wouldn\u2019t be cut again in the future.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe reality is that the norms are unconstitutional in their current form, and the LRC will continue to explore ways to challenge the provisions that allowed for the deviation from the target in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"subheading\">No comment from the ECDOE<\/h2>\n<p>Last week, ECDOE spokesperson Mali Mtima was unreachable by phone, voicemail, or WhatsApp.<\/p>\n<p>It is unclear why the ECDOE allocated just 38% of the school funding targets set by the national government for 2023\/24, where the money intended for school budgets went, or how the ECDOC was able to find R872.5-million to plug the shortfall.<\/p>\n<p>Since 2020, schools in the Eastern Cape have been funded well below the national per-learner target. In 2020, schools were advised they would receive 78% of their budgets due to the Covid-19 pandemic. School budgets were also slashed during the 2021\/2022, 2022\/2023, and 2023\/24 financial years.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"subheading\">Financial burden on parents and teachers<\/h2>\n<p>Boniwe Tyota, a former chairperson of the school governing body of Tantyi Primary School in Makhanda, said the revised budget would mean the school would receive approximately R174,000 more for the 2023\/2024 financial year.<\/p>\n<p>Tyota said the school had been relying on extra funds from parents to keep going. However, Tantyi Primary principal Priscilla Glover said they would not celebrate \u201cuntil the correct money is actually in our accounts\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>In addition, said Glover, much of the money allocated to each school &#8211; for learner support materials such as textbooks, stationery, workbooks and municipal accounts &#8211; is controlled centrally by the ECDOE and does not arrive in the school\u2019s bank account.<\/p>\n<p>She said celebrations were also muted because the per-learner budget allocation \u201cis already pretty darn tight even when it is the correct amount\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCertain costs of running a school have not been factored in \u2013 for example, the cost of the compulsory annual auditor fee of about R5,000,\u201d said Glover. \u201cThe nationally-set budgets for schools have not kept pace with inflation in the last decade.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She said she and her staff had bought things for the school &#8211; pens, paper, plastic to cover textbooks, padlocks, door handles, and cleaning products. Meanwhile, parents were asked to provide one ream of photocopy paper and three rolls of toilet paper.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOnly some families can do that, but each donation counted.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"subheading\">Budget disarray<\/h2>\n<p>Ntsika Secondary School\u2019s School Governing Body chairperson Xolisile Tyotha said thanks to the LRC\u2019s efforts the school\u2019s budget would be more than doubled, from R503,339 to an estimated R1,3-million.<\/p>\n<p>Xolisile said it was difficult to plan effectively when budget decisions are taken this way.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are now already a month into the 2023\/2024 financial year, and we have had to complete our financial planning. Now we are told we will receive new budgets. While we are happy for more money, it disrupts our planning and budgeting. The ECDOE should have issued us with the correct budgets in the first place, and not only when we started putting legal pressure on them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Recently-retired Ntsika principal Madeleine Schoeman said since 2020 her school \u201ctried many avenues unsuccessfully\u201d to fight for their school budgets before turning to the LRC.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow provincial officials expected schools to sit back and accept the inequity of the paper budget of 2023\/4 is beyond my understanding,\u201d said Schoeman.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/for-years-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eastern Cape schools have for years been paid less than the allotted amount per learner. Graphic: Lisa Nelson For years, almost two-thirds of the subsidy per learner has not been paid over to no-fee schools in the Eastern Cape by the provincial education department. Thousands of the province\u2019s no-fee schools have been crippled by budget [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":258850,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928,3247],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-258849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"category-news","9":"tag-groundup","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/for-years-subsidies-have-been-withheld-from-poorest-eastern-cape-schools.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}