Borders of Authority: School Power Struggles in Post-Conflict South Africa

• In Event: Critical Perspectives and Globalizing Implications: Varied Explorations of Global Education and Power

Proposal

Thirty years after South Africa’s democratic transition, the country is relitigating an old debate: who should have the final say in schools? Since the enactment of the South African Schools Act (SASA) in 1996, a striking feature of the education landscape has been the numerous court cases on the powers of school governing bodies (SGBs) vis-à-vis the state. These power struggles are particularly relevant in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, as the state has sought to remedy historical inequalities and pursue its own aims, while SGBs at formerly white-only schools have sought to retain powers around admissions and language polices acquired pre-transition. South Africa’s Parliament is now considering changes to SASA, which clarify provincial departments’ decision-making powers in schools, placing this old question under the spotlight yet again.
Drawing on Taylor’s (2004) concept of ‘social imaginary’ (ideas and values) and with specific reference to the 2023 public hearings on the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill, this paper investigates the contested imaginaries about public schooling, justice and democracy that help explain how school governance arrangements developed during the transition, and to make sense of continued power struggles in South African education. The study employed critical policy analysis of key policy documents, white papers, acts, submissions to Parliament, records of Parliamentary debates and archival documents from the country’s democratic transition process.
While school governance was widely written about in the decade following SASA’s finalisation (Christie, 1995; Dieltiens, 2005; Motala, 2006; Sayed, 1999, 2002), more recent literature is scarce, with a notable scarcity of literature on current legislative developments (Davids, 2023; Soudien, 2023). This paper aims to bridge this gap and contribute to global education debates by unpacking how different ideologies and imaginaries have informed competing approaches to decentralisation in South African education. Furthermore, it shows that South Africa’s move towards decentralisation should not be seen as the mere replication of global policy trends, but must also be understood within the context of local ideological contestations.
References
Christie, P. (1995). Transition Tricks? Policy Models for School Desegregation in South Africa, 1990-1994. Journal of Education Policy, 10(1).
Davids, N. (2023). Governance as subversion of democratisation in South African schools. Ethics and Education, 00(00), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2023.2276026
Dieltiens, V. (2005). The Fault-lines in South African School Governance: Policy or People? The Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD).
Motala, S. (2006). Education resourcing in post-apartheid South Africa: The impact of finance equity reforms in public schooling. Perspectives in Education, 24(2), 79–93.
Sayed, Y. (1999). Discourses of the Policy of Educational Decentralisation in South Africa since 1994: an examination of the South African Schools Act [ 1 ][ 2 ]. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 19(2), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305792990290204
Sayed, Y. (2002). Democratising Education in a Decentralised System: South African policy and practice. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 32(1), 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057920120116517
Soudien, C. (2023). Race, Class, and the Democratic Project in Contemporary South African Education: Working and Reworking the Law. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 31, 4–6. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.31.8017
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Author

• Rone Delene McFarlane, Kings College London