On Wednesday, 17 September 2025, the unfair dismissal review application of former Heathfield High School principal Wesley Neumann will be heard in the Labour Court.
Neumann was dismissed by the Western Cape Education Department over a dispute between the school’s governing body (SGB), which had challenged the call to reopen schools at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the department, which had demanded that the school principal comply with the reopening order. The school never did close, and teachers were always on duty.
The SGB had, however, urged parents to consider the safety of their children, given the prevailing conditions at the time, and the community trusted their recommendation.
This piece explores how race, class and spatial inequality intersect in the case of Heathfield High School. I consider how the SGB’s democratic challenge presented a crisis of legitimacy to education authorities, and how the lack of space for dialogue, along with the state’s failure to make provision for adequately funded public schooling, renders genuine democracy hard to realise in practice.
School governing bodies are meant to deepen democracy by including teachers, parents, students and co-opted members into decision-making. While this is envisioned in policy, SGBs have had differing outcomes.
National school policy confers on SGBs, among other things, the right to determine school fees, language and admission policies. This decentralisation of power has often resulted in rules being used to shore up advantage, rather than exercise authentic democracy.
SGBs have been used by the privileged class to enclose historically white schools through fee-charging, linguistic exclusion and the employment of zone-based admission policies. Such policies are designed to manage the access of those students who do not bear the distinguishing markers of white-tone (see Mark Hunter’s work), and those who do not bolster the school’s academic, cultural and sporting capital.
This privileged class has successfully entrenched exclusivity, finding protection in the compromises of the negotiated settlement that are evident in the Schools Act (now incorporated into the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act), and in educational authorities who turn a blind eye to the veiled racism that hides behind school-level democracy.
SGBs in working-class schools have not found the rules equally beneficial. They do not collect fees, and suffer the effects of a legacy of historical underdevelopment mandated by the apartheid state. In the post-apartheid era, they continue to face shortages and inadequacies while the law wishes them well with an injunction to “take all reasonable measures within its means to supplement the resources supplied by the State…” (section 36 of the Schools Act).
During the Covid-19 pandemic, calls to open or close schools were controversial because decisions about schools have widespread implications for the school, the community and the workplace.
Conundrum
Amid calls to mask up, sanitise and practise social distancing, schools were in a conundrum. Typically, schools gather large groups of learners together in confined spaces: teaching is a social and spatially bound practice.
In these constrained spaces, race/class inequalities in schooling become pronounced. Not all schools have the same resources and infrastructure to support the kind of measures implemented during pandemic times.
Underfunded schools have only the teacher resources provided by teacher post-provisioning policies, whereas historically white schools typically have both the additional teachers afforded by parental fee top-ups and better physical infrastructure, as these schools are built with larger classroom capacity on bigger erfs.
Not only do the advantaged schools have the capacity to school in place, they also have the technology to make the transition to remote learning. In the working-class school, the lack of Wi-Fi in the home, the prohibitive costs of data and the lack of adequate technology infrastructure make remote learning near impossible.
The differences extend beyond the school gate, and there are homologies between classroom space and the spatial realities of the city. Children at school in crowded classrooms typically live in the sprawling spaces of the township and the ghettos that confine the majority of the unemployed and the labouring population.
On the other hand, spacious and spread out suburban neighbourhoods provide relatively comfortable living arrangements for those who school in the fortified parts of the schooling system.
In short, social space is duplicated and mirrored in physical space. One’s position in the social system is also one’s position within the physical dimensions of the city. Blackness tends to mean relegation to the undesirable part of the city and to the under-resourced part of the schooling system.
In the case of Heathfield High, a decision was made during heightened pandemic anxiety within a democratic process involving the principal and SGB for parents to consider keeping their children at home.
To understand the reluctance of the SGB to follow through on the instruction to reopen schools amid pandemic conditions, it is necessary to grasp that their opposition would have considered the conditions of both the school and the communities from which its learners come. They understand the local challenges in an intimate and embodied way because they live and experience them first hand.
Reasonably, the challenge brought by the SGB should be recognised as an opening for dialogue, the absence of which short-circuits the vision of SGBs as vehicles for democracy.
Read more: Not all school governing bodies are created equal and schools suffer
Crisis of legitimacy
When Heathfield High School’s SGB challenged the education department’s instruction, they thrust the department into a crisis of legitimacy. If the authorities had engaged in dialogue, this might have opened the possibility for further contestations from other schools.
In the face of this dilemma, the Western Cape Education Department focused its attention on the school principal and reframed the challenge as a matter concerning an insubordinate school leader.
It is this personalisation and individualisation of collective deliberation through the legitimate vehicle of the SGB that has kickstarted and fuelled an extended legal battle between the school leader, who demands nothing less than to return to his post and get on with educational and pedagogical matters, and a state-sponsored legal team for whom this prospect threatens to undermine the department’s ability to govern.
This clash of perspectives is what the ideal of democracy is about, but sometimes a real test of core ideals can be unsettling. In a post-1994 and still recovering South Africa, democracy demands that the subaltern speak and be heard, but this is incommensurate with leadership practices forged under the old regime that have yet to be undone.
So long as we are unable to find ways into dialogue and listen to the needs of those who make up the majority of South Africa, true democracy eludes us. What the SGB did was to test the authenticity of the democratic process in a matter where substantial conflict existed between the view of those with top-down power, and those who must live out the consequences of choices made by others.
If the only response when faced with conflicting views is that positional authority trumps all, then we are left with only the most anaemic concept of democracy, one which falls short of the substantive meaning of the word, from its roots “demos” and “kratos”, meaning the rule of the people, or people’s power.
Genuine democracy also requires attention to resource (re)distribution. There are vast differences between schools dependent on minimal state resources and those who benefit from fee collection. This situation produces great inequalities and inadequacies: sometimes flaking asbestos roofs, other times teacher shortages and overcrowded classrooms.
These conditions turn our schools into powder kegs where, on any given day, with students and teachers literally breathing down each other’s necks, it would take very little to trigger a violent eruption.
Deep structural inequalities
Amid these deep structural inequalities, the failure to listen is an assault on the dignity of the oppressed. If Heathfield had access to the facilities and staffing components enjoyed by historically white suburban schools, if the ghettos and township unchanged since 1994 transformed, Heathfield might not have fussed about reopening.
The conditions under which Heathfield’s challenge was made existed before the pandemic, and remain today. They represent what many schools all around South Africa face.
The only difference, in the Heathfield case, is that the temporal crisis of pandemic time produced a critical moment of reflexivity in which the school community dared to reject these conditions. That so many schools were inadequately equipped to deal with the everyday demands of schooling, let alone the crisis, is a testimony to the organised abandonment (see Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work) of working-class families — of black and brown children in South Africa.
The vehicle of the SGB is one that must be used. It is a vehicle that is the product of past struggles and hard-won victories. How it is used is what matters.
It should not be an instrument for calling the community to give up the struggle for justice in education, and it must not be used as a tool for exclusion. This is what should be held in clear view as the embattled school leader who chose to represent the interests of the broader school community, via the SGB, heads to the Labour Court. DM
Dr Ashley Visagie is a lecturer in education policy sociology at the School of Education, University of Cape Town.