The cost of learning crisis
How a lack of textbooks is making headlines in South Africa's poorest province
South Africa considers education to its highest domestic priority and the single greatest long-term challenge facing the country.
When it comes to education, South Africa puts its money where its mouth is. In 2020, the country spent 6.8% of its GDP on education, putting it well ahead of even the most high-rolling of OECD countries as a proportion of its revenue.
And yet the money issues plaguing the poorest province risk derailing this national priority. So far this year in Eastern Cape a lack of textbooks has been referred to the Human Rights Commission, driven teachers to industrial action, and brought parents out to the street to protest.
What’s really going on?
How much does a textbook policy cost?
Since the South African Schools Act 1996, free textbooks have been a key pillar of South African education policy. For the last 26 years, this landmark Act has required the Department of Basic Education (DBE) to provide textbooks to no-fee schools.
The DBE sets national policy, but delivery is devolved to provincial education departments. A similar pattern of national policy and local spending applies to money: the Ministry of Finance sets the national budget, but each Provincial Treasury holds the local purse strings.
The commitment to textbooks comes at a considerable cost to the state. Not least because the first year of schooling is provided in 11 home languages, and textbooks must be provided in the language of instruction. Responsibility for printing and distributing the textbooks sits with the provincial education department, with procurement managed through the Provincial Treasury.
The budget line for 2021/22 places the cost of providing textbooks around R1.1bn (£52,556,598/$71,150,115). This is a non-trivial amount of money, representing about 4.35% of the total education budget. And it’s an annual cost. So, in 2022/23, the government will once again spend in the region of R1.1bn printing books, and the following year, and the year after that.
This is an expensive commitment. To work out why the government is committed to spending so much, we have to step back in time to understand the legacy of apartheid.
In 1953, the South African government established bantu schools and ghettoised learning. Black students were taught a diminished curriculum to prepare them for menial work. In 1974 mother-tongue teaching was replaced with Afrikaans, a decision that led to deadly riots. Class sizes in black schools were on average twice the size of those in white schools. In white schools 96% of teachers had teaching certificates; in black schools only 15% of teachers were qualified.
The end of apartheid in 1990 saw a raft of reforms. Firstly to weed out the ethnic divides in the nature and content of the curriculum. Subsequently to begin to address the gulf that had been encouraged to grow between ethnic and economic divides over the years.
Alongside a raft of other policies, the newly formed DBE decided that making textbooks available for free to schools would help make sure that resourcing in rich and poor schools was at least comparable.
This was legislated in the South African Schools Act 1996. Since then, schools – in rich and poor neighbourhoods alike – have received the same textbooks. It remains a core pillar of South African education policy, and the DBE believes it’s bearing fruit.
Even if it is not absolutely clear what interventions are contributing how much to educational improvement, likely explanations include a range of bold initiatives that have been taken by government in recent years. In fact, the TIMSS1 background data reveal a few of the key trends. For instance, the percentage of teachers saying they used a textbook as their main classroom resource for teaching mathematics increased from a worryingly low 30% in 2002 to 70% in 2011. The latter 70% of teachers are concentrated amongst schools serving poorer communities. This trend reflects increased spending on textbooks and, since 2011, a particularly strong emphasis on providing standardised textbooks and workbooks to all schools. As emphasised in the 2009 review of curriculum implementation, insufficient use for of good textbooks had for many years been a reason for poor learning and teaching.
And to answer the L’Oréal question: Why does South Africa spend R1.1bn (£52,556,598/$71,150,115) a year on textbooks? Because it’s worth it.
(Not) fixing the roof while the sun shines
Eastern Cape is the poorest province in South Africa. It has high levels of unemployment (47.1%) and those in work receive the lowest average wages in the country (14% below national average).
Government funding for schools is allocated on a per-student basis, weighted depending on the affluence of the neighbourhood. If a neighbourhood is poor, the school will receive more funding – and will receive further funding still if it becomes a fee-free school. Eastern Cape is a significant beneficiary of this means-tested approach to school funding.
Despite enhanced funding, the province’s school infrastructure falls far short of the DBE’s minimum legal standards. In 2016, Equal Education visited 60 schools in Eastern Cape to assess how many of them met the government’s legal standards. At the time the standards stated that:
… all schools must have access to some form of power supply, water supply and sanitation. Schools entirely made of inappropriate materials, such as mud, metal, asbestos or wood, must be replaced with new schools.
Planning to Fail: A Report on Equal Education’s Eastern Cape School Visits November 2016
17 out of the 60 schools Equal Education visited failed to meet these standards. The damning report paints a vivid picture of dilapidated school buildings, horrific sanitation, and a woeful gap between reality and policy intention.
The ECDoE has a troubling history of underspending its budget. (For example, in February 2021 this led to a lack of transport that left 37,000 children unable to get to school.) So, unsurprisingly, the problems highlighted by Equal Education have not gone away in the intervening years.
In August 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, the Public Service Accountability Monitor reported little progress on school infrastructure (1587 schools in Eastern Cape still had pit latrines as their only form of toilet) and reported that the school infrastructure budget had been cut by R2.2 billion (c£105m/$142m).
Back to the books
Let’s get back to the topic of textbooks, where we at least know the funding is stable.
By the end of 2021, the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDoE) was late in issuing printing contracts for the books. So, when the new academic year began in January 2022, there were no textbooks.
The ECDoE put the delays down to price. The price quoted for printing was above the budget, so the ECDoE had to go cap in hand to the Provincial Treasury. This increased the length of the procurement process, hence the late issuing of contracts.
Following a week of teaching with no textbooks, guidance was issued that parents should buy the books themselves on the private market. This is a significant unexpected expense for the poorest families in the country and perhaps the thing that tipped this into a full-blown crisis.
On 19 January, Yusuf Cassim, Member of the Eastern Cape Provincial Legislature Committee for Education, said that the Democratic Alliance would be referring the issue of missing textbooks to the Human Rights Commission.
On 25 January, tensions between parents and teachers had escalated such that the South African Democratic Teachers Union threatened a walk-out unless ECDoE delivered the over-due books.
Then, on 1 February with the vast balance of books still outstanding, parents in the Alfred Nzo District in Eastern Cape announced they would march in protest of the non-delivery of textbooks.
To quote Ron Burgundy: that escalated quickly.
How to spend it
The speed with which the crisis moved from a lack of textbooks to threats of industrial action and marching parents suggests something else is at play here.
At the beginning of 2022, ECDoE was fighting financial fires on at least two different fronts:
Teachers hadn’t been paid since December due to ‘administrative issues’. (No wonder they’re so prepared to strike!)
And, perhaps more damningly, schools damaged by storms in 2015 still have not been repaired. Instead, students have been receiving lessons in community halls, churches, or even houses.
We’ve seen that the National Treasury makes money available, and yet underspending is still a routine issue in Eastern Cape. Could the issue be the was the ECDoE and Provincial Treasury approach spending?
Governments tend to look at spending, particularly in times of financial crisis (Covid, of course, but also underlying issues since the 2008 financial crisis) through one of two lenses:
As Keynesian stimulant, where government money (typically ploughed into infrastructure projects) spurs private investment by creating jobs and demand. For example the public-private financed expansion of East London Port on the coast of Eastern Cape will increase existing capacity, increase supply, and provide new jobs. It could be reasonably hoped that this would have a sustained positive impact on the local economy.
As a cost centre to be controlled and contained, where a public service is provided through taxpayer funding with no discernible economic benefit. Anyone living in Britain since before 2010 might have dim and distant memories of roads without potholes or, streetlights staying on through the night, or annual per-pupil school spending in England before it fell by 8% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2018-19.
The policy-minded DBE has made its case for investing in teaching and learning materials, but perhaps not loudly enough for the hawks of ECDoE and the Provincial Treasury.
And so they stand on their separate islands, ECDoE and the Provincial Treasury on one side, DBE and the National Treasury on the other. One side advocating the benefits of textbooks; the other prevaricating on perceived unnecessary expenditure.
Thinking of the students in their dilapidated or makeshift schools, their teachers threatening to strike, term time wasting away with no textbooks, it’s easy to feel dispirited. But I think there’s cause for hope.
The DBE has stuck with the textbook policy since 1996, through periods where it will have been viewed as perhaps an excessive expense and a quick-fix headline-catching policy replacement might have been more politically expedient.
Between 2002 and 2011, the DBE put in the hard miles to increase use of textbooks. Changing attitudes and behaviours in the classroom is a long slog, but the work has paid off as can be seen in progress in TIMSS.
If the political will and long-term policy focus remains, there’s no reason why the DBE can’t work away at the systemic issues in the provincial administration. It’s likely to be the work of years, but events of the past month must surely have brought the problem into close focus.
Updating
Libya After the arrest of the Education Minister for a lack of textbooks, and the Culture Minister for corruption, national elections to replace the caretaker government were pushed back to June 2022. Now the Health Minister has been arrested. The interim Prime Minister, who swore not to run in the elections (whenever they’re held), will in fact be running in the elections. Political stability could yet be at risk with reports of an attempted assassination. Meanwhile, textbooks have reportedly begun to arrive in schools – although there is scepticism about whether these are simply the easiest-to-reach schools.
Thank you for reading. Once a month I take a current news story about textbooks and take a closer look to see what’s really going on. If you’d like to read more like this, please subscribe.
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For the uninitiated, TIMSS is an international survey of student performance at grades 4 and 8 in science and mathematics across over 60 countries, which takes place every four years. It’s intended as a temperature check of how an education system is performing, but is increasingly used as a target by countries beadily eying the performance of their local competitors.