School governing bodies and the State: Contesting power in South African schools

• In Event: Social Justice

Proposal

Thirty years since South Africa’s democratic transition, public hearings held by the country’s National Parliament on proposed governance changes to the South African Schools Act (SASA), provide an important opportunity for a critical and historical reflection on school governance in South Africa. Education featured prominently during the democratic negotiations, because it was of high importance for both the liberation movement (Ministerial Review Committee, 2003; National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI), 1992) and the apartheid government (Christie, 1995). The Soweto uprising of 1976 cemented education as a key site of struggle against the apartheid regime and also foregrounded the liberation movement’s call for greater democratic governance in schools, a call that was incorporated into law after 1994.

Since the promulgation of SASA in 1996, a striking feature of the education landscape has been the numerous court cases around its provisions on the powers of school governing bodies (SGBs) vis-à-vis the state. Contestations around decision-making powers and school ethos have become particularly relevant within the context of post-conflict reconstruction in South Africa. The state, on the one hand, has sought to use its powers to redress persistent historical inequalities in the education system and to pursue its own aims. On the other hand, SGBs in former white schools, who were given significant governance powers in the lead up to the democratic transition in 1994, have sought to safeguard their rights to determine the ethos of schools and, amongst others, admission policies, language policies, codes of conduct, religious practices as well as the appointment of teachers. In part, the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) bill is a response to these challenges, as the state seeks to reclaim some decision-making power.

Drawing on Taylor’s (2004) concept of ‘social imaginary’ (the values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social reality), and with specific reference to the 2023 BELA public hearings, this paper explores whether and how contested imaginaries around public schooling and justice are useful in providing an explanation for how school governance arrangements developed during the transition period, and to make sense of the continued power struggles in the South African education landscape. The paper shows that rather than being a new phenomenon, contestations around decision-making powers and school ethos started during the lead-up to South Africa’s first democratic election, carried on during the policymaking process of the transition period, and has continued ever since. A central tension animating contentions throughout has been between the democratic principle of citizen participation and the role of the state to ensure equity (Ministerial Review Committee, 2003; Sayed, 2009). Key to this tension has been competing understandings of ‘the public’ and of participation as the right of a private individual or group to choose, as opposed to the responsibility of a citizen or citizens acting collectively towards a socially just society that benefits the broader public.

The research forms part of ongoing PhD research on school governance in South Africa. The study employed critical policy analysis of key policy documents, white papers, acts, amendment acts, submissions to Parliament and records of Parliamentary debates in the National Parliament. The analysis sought to map shifting imaginaries around public schooling and justice over time and their relationship to evolving education arrangements.

The research fills a gap in scholarship on school governance in South Africa, which has received relatively sparse attention since the mid 2000s. While school governance was widely written about in the decade following the finalisation of SASA (Dieltiens, 2005; Lewis & Naidoo, 2006; Nzimande, 2001; Prinsloo, 2006; Sayed, 1999, 2002, 2009), more recent literature is scarce, especially from education as opposed to legal scholars (Deacon et al., 2016). A large focus of contemporary literature is on the effectiveness of school governance arrangements (Levy et al., 2018), as opposed to on the ideas or imaginaries that inform these arrangements and their social justice implications (Moorosi et al., 2020). Insights gained from this study will help advance critical discussion amid current highly politicised debates concerning the role of school governance arrangements in perpetuating education inequality.

Author

• Rone Delene McFarlane, Kings College London