Is Decentralisation a Suitable Response to Improve South African Rural Education?

Abstract

South Africa (SA) has a decentralised education system. It is generally assumed that decentralisation improves the effectiveness and efficiency of education by responding to the needs, values, and expectations of both local and rural communities. A large part of SA could be described as rural and a large number of learners attend rural schools. This makes rural education a significant part of the South African education context. With education being decentralised, and with decentralisation being heralded as the panacea to the problems faced by rural communities as well as rural education, the assumption is that rural education should be of a high quality. This desk-top paper assesses the potential of decentralisation to improve the quality and effectiveness of South African rural education. This it does by locating decentralisation within neoliberalism which this paper argues is the impetus behind the decentralisation of South African education, and the reason for the decline in the quality and effectiveness of rural education. The paper also highlights certain tensions between the various decentralised spheres of governance, namely the central and provincial Departments of Education and school-level governance structures. The paper further indicates how these tensions potentially hamper the effectiveness and efficiency of rural education. The paper concludes with some recommendations aimed at improving rural education.

Contextual Factors Obstructing the Effective Implementation of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy in the Lesotho Education Sector

“…Rural schools lack basic and necessary resources. Learners travel longer distances to schools; teachers display low morale; teacher quality is poor; educational advisers hardly visit schools; learner enrolment is low; learner absenteeism and dropout rates are very high (Adedeji & Olaniyan, 2011;Teise & Barnett, 2021), and learners not living in supportive environments (Du Plessis & Mestry, 2019). More so as Jakubowski (2022, p.3) lament that in the context of American schools, "infrastructure in many of the rural areas lacked broadband access for the internet."…”