1 400 schools close in past decade

Now overcrowding is threatening the quality of public schooling

NEARLY 1 400 public schools were closed in South Africa over the past 10 years.

The country had 24 453 public schools in 2010, and the number has declined to 23 076.

That’s a loss of 1 377 schools in 10 years for a country that battled serious overcrowding in many schools.

The overcrowding of schools has come back to bite the country as it ponders the re-opening of schools amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Star deducted the decline in schools from two sets of official data: one published in 2010 and another published three weeks ago.

The closures of these schools appeared to be the result of the Basic Education Department’s so-called rationalisation programme.

This largely entailed shutting down of smaller, non-viable schools and merging them with others.

Mpumalanga and Free State were two provinces with a track record of closing down farm schools and opening mega-boarding schools.

The department’s spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga could not be reached for comment yesterday.

The Eastern Cape and Free State had the largest numbers of school closures. A total of 383 were shut down in the Eastern Cape and 337 in Free State.

KwaZulu-Natal recorded 106 closures, while Mpumalanga closed 159 public institutions.

The Western Cape closed the least number of schools. It shut just 10 over the past decade. The figure in the DA-run province would have been at least 37 had the Basic Education Department had its way with its 2012 plan to close 27 schools.

Teacher union Sadtu thwarted the provincial department’s plan

A unionist in the Eastern Cape yesterday cautioned against classifying all closures as rational.

“I wouldn’t attribute all the school closures to rationalisation,” Chris Mdingi, provincial secretary of the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union, said.

“We’ve been at loggerheads many times with the authorities over closing schools. We had to object (to the closures), and stopped them many times. “There are some officials who want to be seen to be doing something on the ground. They do this at the expense of the learners by closing down schools of the sons and daughters of the working class.”

Gauteng was the only province in the country that recorded an increase in the number of schools by 56 to 2 071.

But this was the province that recorded the largest number of growth in the learner population. The learner numbers in Gauteng grew by a whopping 373 000 between 2010 and 2019.

Gauteng has 2 151 095 learners in its 2 071 schools.

In 2014, the province’s legislature recommended that the “National Treasury in collaboration with provincial treasuries should plan, budget and cater for the yearly influx of learners” to Gauteng.

Then chairperson of the legislature’s committee on finance, Sakhiwe Khumalo, said the influx complicated the Gauteng government’s budget planning.

The committee at the time warned that failure to handle the influx threatened to erode the quality of education in Gauteng public schools.

Gauteng education department’s spokesperson Steve Mabona did not respond to questions sent to him via email and WhatsApp last week.

The Star had asked Mabona if the department now had a sustainable plan to handle the influx.

Each year, Gauteng experienced a problem of thousands of children who start the year without a placement in schools. The figure stood at about 7 000 in January.