Education department urged to oversee access to uniforms

The Department of Basic Education needs to improve its oversight role to ensure all school pupils have access to affordable and quality uniforms, while creating an environment for emerging and existing suppliers to work together to boost production, says the Competition Commission of SA.

The commission has released some of its preliminary findings into school uniform cartels. Its probe began in 2015 after parents complained about costs and limited stocks.

The commission has recommended that legislation needs to be revisited to remove “ambiguous language”. Although the Schools Act does give guidelines on uniforms, it leaves the responsibility of uniform requirements mainly to school governing bodies.

The commission has also recommended that the implementation of and interpretation of legislation be monitored by the department’s district officials on a regular basis.

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga did not agree with the notion that uniforms limited access to education for those who could not afford them. Uniforms had the opposite effect and helped to conceal the socioeconomic background of children, she said.

The acting chief director for teacher development in the education department, Enoch Rabotapi, agreed with the commission’s recommendation for the government to play a bigger role in oversight.

“It’s time for us as a department to reflect on existing policies,” said Rabotapi. “Oversight needs to be taken seriously going forward.”

Motshekga said it was simply not practical for the national department to dictate on these matters as each school had its own ecosystem, history and identity. The power was in the hands of parents, she said.

The general secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers Union, Mugwena Maluleke, highlighted the need for the government to improve communication to schools and other stakeholders.

The issue of school identity needed to be interrogated further as it appeared that identity and costs were being used as a means to justify exclusive contracts, which was unlawful, he said. “Discipline is not a product of a school uniform.”

Uniforms should not find their way into nursery schools as that would serve to commodify education even more, promoting further exclusion at an early level, Maluleke warned.

Tshepo Makhene, the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (Sactwu) representative, said that due to the extensive media coverage the matter was generating, the sector was seeing job losses in some local clothing factories that produced schoolwear.

This seemed to have happened because some uniform retailers were unsure what was going to occur and had cut down on uniform procurement, Makhene said.

Sactwu, which organises 119,000 workers in the clothing, textile and related sectors, proposed that the government make all schoolwear in local factories owned and run by the state. Operations could be break-even and savings could be channelled to citizens in the form of cheaper garments.

The government could enforce such a regulation, starting with a minimum of 30% of uniforms being procured from small, medium and micro-sized enterprises. “There may also be an opportunity to target import duties on certain types of finished schoolwear that currently attract import duties of 45%,” Makhene said.

The union also proposed measures such as scrapping value-added tax on uniforms, like countries such as Ireland had done.

Independent Schools Association for Southern Africa executive director Lebogang Montjane said while he agreed that exclusive contracts needed to end, it was impractical to dictate to schools what they should and should not wear.

IT’S TIME FOR US AS A DEPARTMENT TO REFLECT ON EXISTING POLICIES