Is the Right to Education in South Africa Being Realised or Merely Managed?

The Democratic Alliance (DA) prides itself on good governance. In municipalities, good governance can be measured relatively easily through tangible outcomes such as potholes, electricity supply, water provision, sanitation and refuse removal. In education, however, performance is far more difficult to measure, precisely because education is not merely an administrative service, but the realisation of a fundamental right.

At present, the DA holds two influential education portfolios: Siviwe Gwarube as national Minister of Basic Education, and David Maynier as Western Cape MEC for Education. The question is not whether they are active or deliver visible outputs, but whether they are genuinely governing well when measured against the nature and scope of the right to education.

The Right to Education as the Standard

Section 29 of the Constitution guarantees everyone the right to basic education. The only meaningful way to assess the performance of an education minister should therefore be in terms of the extent to which that right is realised, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

However, this first requires a clear understanding of what education actually is.

What Is Education?

South African legislation contains no explicit definition of education. The most authoritative guidance is probably found in Article 26(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that education shall be directed towards “the full development of the human personality and the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

This definition emphasises that education is a highly individualised right. What constitutes a good education for one child may be inappropriate for another. There is no such thing as a universally “good” education for all children. For this reason, Article 26(3) explicitly states: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

Any education policy that ignores this individualised nature necessarily undermines the right itself.

How Does the Schools Act Realise the Right to Education?

The South African Schools Act seeks to realise the right to education through compulsory school attendance. Parents of children between the ages of six and fifteen are required to enrol their children at a school.

Within schools, learners are grouped by age and grade, taught according to a state-prescribed curriculum, and assessed through standardised evaluations. Promotion is based on administrative and curricular compliance, rather than on individual development or need.
The Schools Act therefore focuses primarily on systemic conformity, not on the development of each child’s unique personality. It is therefore unsurprising that education in South Africa is increasingly experienced as being in crisis. As Daily Maverick aptly put it: “We are not educating them; we are merely warehousing them until they are old enough to be an unemployment statistic.”

That the school system is an imperfect instrument for realising the right to education has long been acknowledged. It was for this reason that provision was made for home education in 1996. Since then, education outside the school system has grown exponentially — not as an ideological protest, but as a practical response to systemic shortcomings.

How Should Performance Be Measured?

Education ministers are fond of measuring their performance by:

• matric pass rates,
• the number of schools built,
• the eradication of pit latrines,
  or the number of children granted access to schools.

While these metrics are easily quantifiable, they say almost nothing about the extent to which the right to education is being realised.

More meaningful measures would include:

• the degree to which freedom is created for diverse forms of education beyond the school model;
• the extent to which parents are empowered to take responsibility and to choose education that serves the best interests of each individual child.

How Do the DA Ministers Perform According to These Measures?

David Maynier

David Maynier’s predecessor, Debbie Schäfer, took limited but meaningful steps to promote educational pluralism. The Western Cape Education Act was amended to allow for collaborative schools, and a home educator was included on the provincial education council.

Under Maynier’s leadership, however, this approach has given way to a renewed focus on expanding and consolidating public schools. The appointment of a provincial education council has been abandoned.

Maynier’s limited understanding of home education became evident during a parliamentary session in which a senior official, in his presence, incorrectly claimed that home-educating parents must hold certain qualifications and that home visits were compulsory. These claims were later formally withdrawn. The incident suggests not merely a communication error, but a fundamental unfamiliarity with a lawful and growing form of education.

In short: Maynier manages the school system efficiently, but shows little interest in strengthening the right to education outside that system.

Siviwe Gwarube

As national minister, Siviwe Gwarube has adopted a more explicitly centralising approach. She has publicly committed herself to implementing the BELA Act, which, among other things:

• introduces stricter registration requirements for home education,
• imposes heavier penalties on parents who fail to register,
• and increases sanctions against unregistered independent schools.

Unlike her predecessor, she has appointed a national education and training council. Notably, however, no representative of home education was included — despite the fact that home education is one of the fastest-growing forms of education in the country. The department’s 2024–2029 research plan contains no reference to education outside the school system. Like her predecessor, she continues to regulate home education without even the most basic research into how many home learners there are.

Gwarube’s policy approach reveals a clear premise: equality is promoted by placing more children within the same system, under the same curriculum and under the same supervision. Freedom, parental choice and educational diversity are not regarded as valuable features of a healthy education order, but as risks to be managed and constrained.

The Growing Divide

While ministers build their political careers on statistics suggesting how well “the system” is functioning, parents are dealing with traumatised children, children who hate school, children who are not thriving, children who have adopted values different from those of their parents. These are the same children reflected in TIMSS and PIRLS statistics, which show that 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. The divide between ministers and parents grows wider each day.

Forty per cent of the Grade 1 cohort leaves the school system before reaching matric. Some parents choose home education. Others send their children to centres too small or too unconventional to register as independent schools. When ministers fail to realise the right to education in terms of Section 29 of the Constitution, parents act in the best interests of their children in terms of Section 28 and exit the school system.

Conclusion

Where Debbie Schäfer made limited efforts to grant parents greater choice and responsibility, the current DA ministers are focused on further expanding and protecting the state-controlled school system — even at a time of shrinking budgets and increasing systemic strain.

The core problem is not that Gwarube and Maynier are inactive. It is that both are highly competent managers of a system that structurally impoverishes the right to education by reducing it to school attendance, administrative compliance and measurable outputs.

If the school system is no longer capable of realising the right to education, it is futile to attempt to repair the system alone. Good management of the wrong paradigm remains poor governance.

Perhaps the more fundamental question is not how to repair the existing system, but whether a broader framework of educational choice — one that recognises parents as primary decision-makers should form part of the solution.