By Thapelo Molefe
The basic education system remains marred by deep inequalities in funding and resources, despite decades of policy adoption aimed at redress.
This was revealed during a strategic engagement on school funding norms in Parliament.
Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education, Khomotjo Maimela, opened the session on Tuesday by reaffirming the government’s commitment to access, citing pro-poor policies like no-fee schools, scholar transport and school nutrition programs.
“Our observations are that with the immense strides that we’ve made in ensuring that we open access, there is still the aspect of quality of this education that is still an issue,” Maimela said.
The Department of Basic Education presented an overview of how funding was determined. According to CFO Patrick Khunou, the current per learner allocation for 2025 stood at R1754 for no-fee schools, R879 for quintile 4 schools and R301 for quintile 5 schools.
However, several provinces were unable to meet this national target.
“KZN, Mpumalanga and Northern Cape are contributing less than the agreed norm of R1,754,” Khunou acknowledged.
Notably, KwaZulu-Natal’s allocations have remained unchanged since 2015 and are below the national target since 2011, affecting 2.2 million no-fee and 532,000 fee-paying learners.
In Mpumalanga, the 2025 allocation for no-fee learners is R1,450 and still well below the threshold. The Northern Cape dropped drastically from meeting the 2024 target to just R836 per learner in 2025, funding less than 50% of the requirement.
Chairperson of the Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC), Patience Mbava, emphasised the consequences of underfunding.
“Many under-resourced schools continue to operate below the minimum per learner thresholds, undermining the very equity goals the norms seek to achieve,” she stated.
The FFC presentation revealed that the national learner-educator ratio has worsened, rising from 29.8 in 2017 to 31.0 in 2024.
“Public educators are managing significantly larger class sizes than their counterparts in the private sector,” the FFC reported, warning of growing class sizes and strained learning environments in provinces with high in-migration.
Infrastructure deficits also emerged as a major concern.
The FFC noted that schools in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Gauteng face the most severe infrastructure backlogs, often operating from inappropriate buildings and lacking basic amenities like sanitation and electricity.
These deficiencies negatively impact educational outcomes, particularly in lower-quintile schools.
The FFC recommends a shift from community-based quintile classifications to individual learner-based assessments.
“Funding norms and standards must follow function. We need to improve educational outcomes of each learner, regardless of which quintile and which school a learner attends,” Mbava said.
Maimela echoed this urgency, calling for a deeper assessment.
“We wanted to have a strategic engagement… on the comprehensive expenditure that the government applies per learner, per year, so that we’re able to determine if we have policy gaps in terms of the funding,” she said.
The session concluded with a call for another round of engagements, during which the department is expected to present a full breakdown of annual per learner expenditure across all critical services, starting from teaching materials and nutrition to infrastructure and teacher compensation.
INSIDE EDUCATION
