The GDE blames pressure from National Treasury, which is trying to save money at the same time as aligning the support of schools
Some will applaud the Gauteng department of education for “adjusting” government funding paid to quintile 5 schools – the former “Model C” institutions where, it is supposed, the rich send their children.
They would feel this is levelling the playing fields and negating unearned privilege passed on from previous generations.
The wealthy don’t use government schools
The problem with that is that rich people in this country don’t send their offspring to government schools.
They go private. And if you have any doubt about that, and about how many are wealthy enough to do so, just look at the expansion of corporatised private education over the past decade.
The other reality is that people who are putting their kids in quintile 5 schools are not wealthy.
They are middle-class people, struggling to get by, as most of us do. To slash government funding for the schools’ operational requirements by as much as 64% – as the DA claims – means the financial burden on these parents will increase massively.
ALSO READ: KZN Education to address sanitation crisis at Nkandla school
Detached decision-makers
That, of course, is not something to bother the politicians who oversee our lives – very few of them have children registered as pupils in government schools. Ah, the good old “Don’t do what I do, do what I say” school of governance
The department blames pressure from the National Treasury, which is trying to save money at the same time as aligning the support of schools in perhaps a more equitable way.
However, as we see every day in this newspaper, the reason the Treasury is having to do flick-flacks to sew its coat according to its increasingly threadbare cloth is that money is being looted left, right and centre.
That’s the reason for realignment. What should happen, though, is that the thieves should be prosecuted and money reallocated so that all schools are brought up to quintile 5 levels, not the other way around.
NOW READ: GDE responds to claims of 64% funding cut to Quintile 5 schools
