This is the first in a series of ten articles setting out, you guessed it, ten reasons for home schoolers to reject the BELA Bill. However, these articles do not have a primarily negative purpose, they also aim to show how constitutionally compliant and “best practice” changes can be made to Section 51 of the South African Schools Act.
In this first article we outline the fact that BELA Bill is not working even though it is not yet in force. Below we explain how this can be the case.
You can read all of the 10 Reasons here as well as some of the solutions LearnFree proposed. Over the next few weeks we will be publishing all ten reasons in more detail.
Reason 1: BELA BILL has failed
Section 51 of BELA Bill doesn’t work in practice. It may seem strange to say this as BELA Bill is still being considered by Parliament. So how can BELA Bill not be working if it isn’t even a law yet?
BELA Bill was published for public comment in 2017 and is only passing through parliament in 2023. One month after the Bill was published for comment a new Policy on Home Education was published for comment and came into force a year later. If you study the Policy it is clearly based on the BELA Bill and not the current Section 51 of the South African Schools Act so it is BELA Bill in action.
Virtually the only administrative provision that is not in the Policy that is in the Bill is Section 51(6) that allows for “automatic” registration after 60 days.
Since the policy has been implemented the PEDs have been overwhelmed by the administrative requirements of the Policy.
This is proved by the following facts:
· 70 % of home schoolers were still waiting for a response to their applications for registration.
· 66% of those had been waiting for longer than six months for their registration application to be approved.
· Even more concerning 38 % had been waiting longer than a year.
· In KZN, 1 in 5 applications are approved and 1 in 5 are rejected i.e., one rejection for every approval. 60 percent have not received a response but based on the refusal rate to date up to half of these could be refused.
· Over 50% of home schoolers are not willing to register under these circumstances.
In a number of provinces this is not the fault of the officials but rather the complexity of the registration requirements and the lack of appropriate tools. Many official’s mailboxes are too small for the large number of documents required for each registration and these become overwhelmed, and applications go missing.
Has the Policy on Home Education helped the DBE collect reliable figures?
Even after 3 years the DBE is unable to produce reliable or consistent figures on home education. In its 2021/2022 Annual Report under the heading “Registration of learners for Home Education (HE)” the DBE states that “2 075 applications were received, of which 1 214 were approved, bringing the number of learners registered for Home Education by December 2021 to 6 049. However, this number decreased, with 3 444 learners registered for Home Education by the end of March 2022.”.
While LearnFree is fairly used to seeing rather fanciful numbers being thrown about when discussing home schooling these numbers of completely unbelievable. According to this report the number of home schoolers have reduced by nearly half in 3 months! While the DBE is required to report on the implementation of compulsory education, how can this be taken seriously when without any critical comment figures like this appear in an annual report?
Another alarming figure is the number of rejections, with nearly 40% being rejected it is no surprise that so many home schoolers are opposed to asking permission to home school and are requesting a notification process.
Will BELA Bill do anything to improve this situation
The proposed Section 51(6) of BELA Bill states that if the provincial education department does not “respond” within 60 days of an application the “application shall be deemed to have been approved”, if you can prove that the application has been submitted. This could amount to a kind of ‘automatic’ registration.
This sub-section could address the problem of the 66% of home schoolers waiting over six months for approval. However, the problem is that the education department must merely “respond”. It is not inconceivable that an education department would send a one-line “response” and that would not activate ‘automatic’ registration.
Home schoolers should ask that the wording of this sub-section be changed to “processed” or a similar phrase to ensure that a mere “response” will not allow for ‘automatic’ registration to not take place.
On the principle that what the state gives with one hand it takes away with the other the clause immediately before this i.e., Section 51(5) requires that home schoolers who are not registered will have to apply for registration within 30 days of BELA Bill becoming law.
Based on LearnFree’s model of the total number of home schoolers and plugging the DBE’s end of 2021 figure into that model it appears that approximately 30 000 home schoolers would need to apply with 30 days of BELA Bill becoming law.
The provincial education departments cannot efficiently process the current number of applications it is unlikely that they would be in a position to process 30 000 applications.
In conclusion, the BELA Bill, despite not being passed into law, has already demonstrated that it will not work because it is essentially the Policy on Home Education that has been in operation since 2019 turned into a law.
Its potential to overwhelm administrative systems, long delays in registration approval, high rejection rates, and lack of reliability in data collection, all demonstrate that the Bill will not solve any problems.
Furthermore, the Bill would require an unrealistic mass registration in an extraordinarily short period of time, putting further strain on already struggling provincial education departments. These problems underscore the need for meaningful amendments to the BELA Bill that respect the rights of home schoolers and make the registration process more streamlined and efficient.
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