School funding: South Africa can learn from the world

By Birgit Weyss, Nurina Allly and Daniel McLaren

Some countries have managed to improve outcomes for their most disadvantaged learners

In previous articles we have suggested that South Africa’s school funding model is perpetuating rather than redressing an unequal education system. We showed that poorer and more rural provinces allocate less funds per learner than richer and more urban provinces. We demonstrated how more qualified teachers with higher salaries are predominantly found in schools in better-off areas, further leading provinces to spend more per child on personnel costs at these schools. We looked at the question of fees and asked why we remain among only a handful of countries globally that permit the charging of fees in (some) public schools.