The debate over the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (BELA Act), has largely been presented as a straightforward argument about school governing bodies (SGBs) and state power.
Critics say the Act undermines the authority of SGBs, particularly regarding language and admission policies. Supporters argue that stronger provincial oversight is necessary to prevent schools from using their autonomy to exclude learners and preserve old patterns of privilege.
While both sides are responding to a real problem, they are also missing something important.
The problem with South Africa’s education governance system is not simply that SGBs have too much power, or that the state has too little. It is that the system itself gives different institutions overlapping responsibilities while expecting them to share a common understanding of what educational governance is supposed to achieve.
This is the tension the BELA Act does not resolve.
The South African Schools Act of 1996 creates a form of hybrid governance. Schools are neither completely autonomous nor simply extensions of provincial education departments. SGBs have legally defined responsibilities, including the adoption of language and admission policies, with provincial departments retaining important oversight responsibilities.
This arrangement reflects a reasonable post-apartheid compromise. It recognises that schools should have some meaningful control over their affairs while remaining part of a publicly funded education system subject to state oversight.
The difficulty is that the different actors within this system do not necessarily agree on what that balance should mean.
Many SGBs, particularly in former Model C schools, approach language and admission disputes from the perspective of institutional autonomy. They argue that a school’s language policy reflects the preferences of its community, that mother-tongue education has educational value, and that admission policies must take account of the school’s actual capacity and resources.
Some state actors approach the same questions very differently. Influenced by transformative constitutionalism, they place greater emphasis on substantive equality and the need to use state power to dismantle institutional arrangements that they regard as perpetuating exclusion.
This helps explain why disputes have repeatedly ended up in court.
The Constitutional Court’s judgments in cases such as Hoërskool Ermelo and Rivonia Primary School were not simply about the technical interpretation of school governing bodies’ powers. They reflect much deeper disagreements about equality, institutional autonomy, language, access and the role of the state in transforming society.
The BELA Act responds to these tensions by strengthening provincial authority over language and admission policies. The expectation appears to be that greater state oversight will allow problematic policies to be identified and dealt with before they become major disputes.
But there is no reason to assume that moving the point of intervention necessarily removes the conflict.
A dispute that previously occurred between an SGB and a provincial department over the legality of a policy could simply become a dispute over the provincial department’s decision to approve or reject that policy. Instead of eliminating litigation, the state may merely be changing the question that eventually reaches the courts.
More importantly, greater provincial control does not resolve the underlying disagreement about what education policy should seek to achieve.
If one side believes that a language policy protects educational quality and mother-tongue instruction, while the other believes that the same policy perpetuates exclusion, transferring the final decision from the SGB to the provincial department does not make those competing views disappear.
It simply gives one institution greater power to impose its interpretation.
This is why the answer to South Africa’s education crisis cannot simply be more centralisation.
The state undoubtedly has a responsibility to ensure that public schools comply with constitutional rights and that learners are not unlawfully excluded. But this does not require treating meaningful school-level autonomy as an obstacle to transformation.
There is another approach.
Rather than constantly trying to bring high-performing schools under greater state control, policymakers should ask why so many other public schools are unable to achieve comparable standards. Improving failing schools, expanding educational infrastructure and addressing capacity constraints would do far more to broaden educational opportunity than repeatedly intervening in the governance of schools that are already functioning relatively well.
The lesson of the BELA controversy is therefore bigger than BELA itself.
South Africa needs to reconsider the educational governance model that was created in 1996. The choice should not be between unchecked SGB autonomy and increasingly intrusive provincial control.
A clearer allocation of responsibilities that protects constitutional rights while preserving meaningful autonomy at school level is needed.
Education policy should ultimately be about educating children. Governance arrangements are supposed to serve that purpose, not become an endless source of institutional conflict.
The BELA Act may change who gets the final say, but it does not necessarily solve the reason why the parties keep fighting in the first place.
Ayanda Sakhile Zulu holds a BSocSci in Political Studies from the University of Pretoria and is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.
