How Free is Education in SA?

South Africa likes to think of itself as a country committed to human rights and freedom. Yet when educational freedom is measured internationally, the picture is considerably less impressive.

In the 2023 Freedom of Education Index, South Africa ranked only 81st out of 157 countries. The Index measures educational pluralism by considering whether non-government schools may legally operate, how they are funded, primary-school enrolment and the proportion of children educated outside government schools.

In SA home education is treated differently

South Africa receives recognition in the Freedom of Education Index for legally permitting home education, however, the head of department (essentially the education officials in a province) must be statisfied that home education is in the child’s best interests in order to register a child.

A parent enrolling a child in an ordinary public school or independent school does not first have to persuade an education official that public schooling is in that particular child’s best interests.

If the State wishes to treat the best-interests principle as an individual educational test, logically the same question should be asked of every educational arrangement. Is this particular public school in this particular child's best interests? Is the class size appropriate? Is the child safe? Is bullying being adequately addressed? Is meaningful learning actually taking place?

South Africa's schools struggle with serious problems, including educational inequality, poor literacy and numeracy outcomes, infrastructure backlogs, teacher shortages, uneven teaching quality and high dropout rates. It is therefore difficult to justify an assumption that institutional schooling is automatically acceptable while home education requires special justification.

The parents judgement should be the starting point

Home schoolers should be treated like any other parent and legislation and regulations should begin with the presumption that parents are ordinarily best placed to determine which lawful educational option serves their child's needs. Parents know the child's personality, abilities, difficulties, interests, health, family circumstances and previous educational experiences in a way that an official processing an application cannot.

The additional difficulty is that determining an individual child's best interests is a highly complex exercise, yet in the home-education context it is placed in the hands of education officials. Such determinations are ordinarily associated with specialist judicial processes such as those undertaken by Children's Courts. An administrative official considering a home-education application is not well positioned to make a sweeping determination about what educational environment is ultimately best for a particular child.

Practically, few home education application are processed with the 60-days allowed by statue anyway and by the end of the first year of the BELA Act being in force only around 20% of home schoolers had received their registration certificates and numbers. Eighty percent of homesachoolers who had applied were deemed approved and the vast majority of applications hadn't been evaluated on the best interests criteria in any event.

Schools are either established by or registered with the State and this theoretically (very theoretically) provides some degree of assurance that learning is taking place. The registration process can then ask parents to provide some minimum information that demonstrates that the child will be in a suitable learning environment. But that is very different from requiring every home-educating parent to prove to an administrator that the parent's judgement is correct.