Private schooling not
BEFORE the school day begins at SPARK Bramley, children sing and dance, swaying to positive, upbeat tunes.
On a recent Wednesday morning, it’s Whitney Houston and OneRepublic on the beat.
Wearing khaki shorts and navy polo shirts adorned with laurel leaves, the SPARK logo, the children take advantage of Sparks Fly, their morning assembly, to get ready for the school day.
“I am a SPARK scholar and I’m going to university,” the children recite, a reflection of SPARK’s core values: service, persistence, achievement, responsibility and kindness. At this location, there’s also a Bramley-specific core value of compassion.
It’s a daily morning tradition at all 11 sites in the SPARK Schools network, a group of low-cost private schools that are a part of a rapidly growing trend in Gauteng, where a quarter of schools are independent and nearly 40% of the country’s independent schools are located.
However, not all low-cost private schools are created equal. Education experts warn of unregistered fly-by-night operators that prey on the perception that private necessarily means better.
And even the legitimate outfits, such as the ones in the SPARK network, face their own issues – mainly, a question of whether they are truly affordable.
Lebogang Montjane, the chief executive of the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa (Isasa), said the rise in independent schooling as a whole can be traced to the beginning of democracy in South Africa.
“Before 1994, the vast majority were denied school choice for their children,” he said.
“Now parents can exercise the freedom to choose what type of education they will give to their children.”
In Gauteng, which devoted the lion’s share of its provincial budget to education, the issue of placing an ever growing number of students in a limited number of schools has contributed to the rise in these alternatives.
There are 18% of the country’s pupils in Gauteng and supported by only 11% of the country’s schools, according to preliminary 2016 data from the Department of Basic Education. The rise of urbanisation, coupled with the lag in building public schools to meet the growth, has created a gap in the market that independent schools are seeking to fill, Montjane said.
The growth of affordable private schooling can be traced “to a persistent parental demand for more, better and different”, Montjane said, referring to the lack of government schools, the perception that private means better quality and the desire for different curricula, philosophies or focuses.
Although private education is a growing sector, education professor Shireen Motala said it was too small to be a long-term solution, with less than 7% of the country’s schools being independent.
“They’ll never be a solution to the problem of poor-quality public schooling because the reach of private schools, low cost or high cost, is so small,” said the University of Johannesburg professor.
The rise in alternative options of schooling has also led to something more sinister: unregistered, illegally operating independent schools.
Salim Vally, an education professor at the University of Johannesburg, said these schools often open in city centres and prey on parents who perceive a private education as a better one.
“The mere fact that they are private and in the city centre, for many parents, they believe that this automatically will translate into quality education, but it’s been shown that many of these schools are really rackets,” said Vally, who also directs the university’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation.
Montjane cautioned against the perception, saying that just as there are independent schools that outperform public schools, there are high-performing public schools that outpace independent schools.
Although any person can open up an independent school, it must be registered with the provincial education department. Convicted violators face a sentence of at least three months.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said it’s difficult to estimate how many schools are operating illegally, because if a school is able to bankroll itself, then there would be no need to request financial assistance from the government.
“People try to open a school almost every day, but there is a process that needs to be followed,” he said.
“People have tried to open illegal schools, but it’s very difficult to operate one.”
Oupa Bodibe, the Gauteng Education Department spokesperson said when they shut down an illegal school, they work with parents to place pupils into public schools.
Parents should remove their children from the school while this is happening, he added.
There is a danger in viewing this booming sector as the solution to a crisis in public education, according to education experts, citing doubts of the sector’s ability to reach a wide swath of the population.
SPARK charged about R19 000 for tuition in 2017.
By comparison, the most expensive private schools easily break the R100 000 mark, and JSE-listed Curro Holdings, a network of more than 100 affordable private schools, charged between R12 000 and R90 000, depending on the model, last year.
Although low-cost private school networks like SPARK and Curro offer cheaper options for private schooling, the fees they charge are not low cost for the majority, Vally said.
“You perpetuate inequalities no longer along racial lines as in the past, but along social class lines,” he said.
“Some call it class apartheid.” By removing middle-class children from public education disrupted a wider network of social cohesion and interaction, he said.
The global move toward privatising education at a lower price point is highly controversial, with critics warning that the low-cost private schooling industry is largely undefined.