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Abstract
Eighteen years after the introduction of several education reform policies, education in South Africa continues to be unequal and complicated. Departmental officials within the Department of Basic Education, educationists and academics have disclosed the trauma and the devastation that the apartheid propagandists’ discriminatory policies have caused. This has forced the current stakeholders to embark on a vigorous campaign to re-evaluate the transformational policies that were designed to hasten progress to erase the inhumane atrocities of the pre-apartheid and apartheid eras. It has therefore become the National Department of Basic Education’s responsibility to change the discriminatory thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of the past. Most important of all, this department has had the responsibility of redirecting resources and investments to those schools that have been victims of the oppressive laws of the past and bring them on par with schools that had benefited from apartheid. The present government therefore has set its attention on correcting the imbalances of the past by focusing on the poorest of the poor and targeting the segments of society in which poverty is the dominant social ill, and by creating equity and social justice. This approach led to the formulation of the National Norms and Standards for School Funding in public schools in 1998 (South Africa, 1998), hereafter referred to as the “NNSSF in public schools”. This policy provides guidelines for the distribution of government resources to “poor schools” in order to align these schools with apartheid institutions of learning.
Historically it has been concluded that schools with few or poor resources have difficulty in providing good quality education in comparison with those that had benefited from the apartheid regime. It has therefore become the post-apartheid government’s responsibility to bring the poor and rich schools on par. The state has realised that this can be done through the NNSSF in public schools and using equity and social justice as the catalyst. Through this policy it was the government’s intention to transform schools and redress the inequalities and imbalances of the past. This approach was intended to create an education system that would embrace learner diversity and ensure that all learners were granted equal educational opportunities, irrespective of their race, colour, creed or class.
Using the qualitative method, the general aim of this research was to determine the perceptions of stakeholders in six schools with regard to the progress made by the NNSSF in public schools. Matters that have impacted on the implementation of equity and social justice are also discussed in this report. Included is also the identification of the challenges that may have been encountered in the implementation of the NNSSF in public schools. The core focus of the study is on the disparities between the intention and the implementation of the NNSSF in public schools in terms of equity and social justice, and the implications of this policy on the day-to-day functioning and operations of these six public schools.
