Durban - KwaZulu-Natal schoolchildren are facing a daily battle to get an education - from walking long distances to learning under trees.
This is despite the provincial Department of Education’s promises to deal with infrastructure backlogs and the lack of adequate pupil transport.
The department has been plagued by financial woes for the past eight years owing to the overspending of its budget, with the lion’s share going towards teacher salaries, and infrastructure development falling by the wayside.
In her budget speech last month, Education MEC Peggy Nkonyeni said the department was trying to move on from a difficult financial period.
“I am presenting this budget against a financially tough seven to eight years, where the department was faced with pressures from the high various wage agreements and the occupation specific dispensation,” she said.
Last year, the department was forced to stop construction on schools and in the past few months, it had to dip into its infrastructure budget to pay teachers and officials. However, Nkonyeni said it aimed to meet its infrastructure targets for 2015/16 financial year to ensure that:
* 10 new schools were ready for occupation and 29 new schools were under construction; and
* a total of 450 classrooms and 1 000 specialist rooms to be built in public schools
This is, however, cold comfort for 120 pupils at Morning Star primary school in Colenso, who have to learn under trees. The school has four mobile classrooms, which are used by Grade 5 to 9 pupils and the lower grades learn outside.
Since 2007, the lower grades had been using stables, which used to house pigs and calves, but this was stopped last month after two pupils died in a car accident. The pupils have to cross a road to get to the stables and the two were killed while crossing the road.
An October 2014 report from the Basic Education Department showed that 2 122 of 5 859 schools had flush toilets while pit toilets were being used at 3 099 schools.
Of 5 859 schools, most had water while 183 schools had no water and 1 454 had an unreliable supply.
The report did not deal with the lack of classrooms or the adequacy of existing structures.
NGO Equal Education said it had identified several schools that did not have adequate classrooms, and it wanted the government to attend to these schools in the next three years.
Equal Education’s KwaZulu-Natal organiser Sandile Ndlovu said a Msinga primary school had only one classroom and the rest of the pupils had to use a shack.
It has been suggested that the lack of facilities had a knock-on effect on the number of children who have to travel long distances.
A 2013 Statistics South Africa report showed that KZN had the largest number of pupils who walked to school and also the highest proportion of those who walked more than 15 minutes to get to their transport.
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga said last week that transport for pupils was key in reducing the drop-out rates and that the intention was for a national pupil transport policy to be implemented this financial year.
The National Teachers Union’s Allen Thompson said the construction and upgrade of township and rural schools should be prioritised so that pupils would not have to look for schools in other areas.
He said teachers were faced with tired pupils because they got up early to walk to school and spent hours travelling.
This is the case for pupils at Hlalele Primary in Nquthu, who spend nearly two hours walking to school.
Ndlovu said the organisation had taken up the plight of Nquthu’s pupils. Last month, they marched to the department’s Pietermaritzburg offices to demand that their needs were met.
“Last year, a pupil was raped en route to school and a similar incident happened this year. Other pupils had reported incidents of crime.”
In a letter to Equal Education, education department head Nkosinathi Sishi said there were 914 children from five Nquthu schools who had access to government-subsidised transport, but Hlalele Primary was not one of them.
The NGO gave Sishi a list of 14 schools that it said should have access to scholar transport. But the department said only three of the schools qualified. It said the other 11 schools, including Hlalele Primary, were built close enough to the Nquthu communities they were meant to serve. It said if pupils from these communities were travelling long distances, then they were attending “schools of choice”, not “schools of need”.
The department also said the provincial purse was too small to meet the demand for pupil transport, while provinces with fewer school-going children had bigger budgets.
However, Ndlovu said that pupils were being forced to walk long distances because there were no schools in communities like KwaQabe, Mtshongwani and Tshekwini in Nquthu.
He said the department was trying to shirk its responsibility and only allocated R186 million for pupil transport in the 2015/16 financial year while the Eastern Cape, which had fewer pupils requiring transport, had budgeted for R432m.
University of KwaZulu-Natal researcher, Glen Robbins, said the provincial education department had a challenge in trying to balance reduced budget allocations and paying back more than R1 billion overspent on salaries more than five years ago.
undefined“The infrastructure backlog can be blamed on the previous spending habits of the department as well as the increase of the number of people in the urban areas, which means that some existing schools need additional classroom or new schools need to be built,” he said.
The South African Democratic Teacher Union’s deputy provincial secretary, Bheki Shandu, said pupil transport and infrastructure were the cornerstones of quality education. “The department received a R3bn boost in this year’s budget and we would like to see these funds directed to these programmes,” he said.
The Mercury