Pretoria - The discrimination problems at a Pretoria high school for girls are not based on the institution’s policy but emanate from years of dismissing pupils’ concerns, the Department of Basic Education has said.
Spokesman Elijah Mhlanga said the school’s code of conduct was not too problematic but it was the daily treatment of and discrimination against pupils that created tensions.
Black pupils at the school have accused teachers of not allowing them to have afros or grow dreadlocks or braids. They have also complained about discriminatory treatment.
“The problem is individual teachers who have been allowed to say certain things to learners, and when they complain, nothing is done. This then becomes the culture of the school,” Mhlanga said on Monday.
The department was reviewing school policies, including the SA Schools Act and the role of school governing bodies.
He and a team from the Gauteng Education Department visited the school on Monday, and MEC Panyaza Lesufi suspended the school’s code of conduct. He appointed an independent body to investigate the allegations.
Mhlanga said that while the matter was serious, it happened in only the minority of schools. “The majority of our schools are run very well. When matters like this happen, we come down heavily on them. But there is a sensitive balancing act that we have to perform so that we don’t punish all schools.”
Gauteng Education Department spokesman Oupa Bodibe said the issue of suspending the principal or teachers would be determined by the commission.
Since the hair saga started at the Pretoria school, a pupil from Lawson Brown High School in Port Elizabeth has also taken her school to task. The Grade 12 pupil had been threatened that she would not be able to write her exams, which start today, if she did not get rid of her afro.
At St Michael’s School for Girls in Bloemfontein, black pupils were given a swimming cap to check how neat their hair was. If the cap did not fit a girl’s head, it meant the hair was untidy. Parents met management yesterday and the rule was stopped with immediate effect.
Lobby group Equal Education (EE) said that last year, the organisation had defended a Rastafarian pupil who was not allowed to keep dreadlocks – even though they are part of her religious beliefs. “The school refused to change the code of conduct and the girl missed four months of schooling. The court found in her favour. Astoundingly, days after the court order, the principal and the chair of the school governing body disrupted teaching and learning by yanking learners out of class, raging that no learning would take place while exceptions were being made for certain learners.
"This is a classic example of how schools perpetuate discrimination,” said EE spokeswoman Nombulelo Nyathela.
Meanwhile, all political parties in the Gauteng legislature agreed that the racism allegations levelled against the Pretoria high school should be addressed immediately. Gauteng ANC MPL Busisiwe Mncube asked Lesufi to extend his investigations to other schools perceived to have the same discriminatory codes of conduct.
Premier David Makhura praised the Pretoria girls for speaking out about racism, saying they had “challenged discrimination and (drawn) the attention of the entire nation to possible acts of racism in one of our province’s top-performing schools”. – Additional reporting by Baldwin Ndaba