In the ruthless marketplace of South African education, capitalism has found its most potent weapon: the myth and illusion of choice. The quintile school system, formalised through the 1998 National Norms and Standards for School Funding, operates as a sophisticated sorting apparatus that disguises systemic inequality behind a false narrative of meritocracy.
While designed to redistribute resources by allowing wealthy schools to charge fees and reduce their draw on public funds, it has instead entrenched market logic into public education, transforming a collective social endeavour into a competitive arena where privilege compounds itself.
Across South Africa, schools separated by mere kilometres exist in radically different economic universes. Historically privileged schools maintain small class sizes and well-resourced environments through strategic enrolment caps. Their facilities are maintained, libraries stocked and programmes robust. Meanwhile, schools serving working-class pupils struggle with overcrowded classrooms, inadequate infrastructure, and limited materials.
When opportunities arise for cross-school collaboration, privileged institutions refuse to engage. Rather than participating in initiatives addressing systemic inequalities, they protect exclusive access to resources. This demonstrates how market logic creates perverse incentives: schools compete for advantage rather than collaborate for improvement. By refusing to engage across socioeconomic divides, they actively preserve the inequalities the quintile system was meant to address. This is capitalist social reproduction, where public education maintains economic hierarchies rather than dismantling them.
The evidence: A system in crisis
Recent parliamentary oversight provides concrete evidence of dysfunction. In 2025, the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education heard testimony about provinces systematically underfunding no-fee schools, with some funding learners at only 48-54% of the national threshold. This is structural violence enacted through budgetary mechanisms.
Committees uncovered catastrophic failures: only 35 classrooms and 50 sanitation facilities were built in 2025/26 despite backlogs affecting more than 13.5 million learners. Three decades into democracy, children learn in unsafe buildings while the Department of Basic Education surrendered R112-million in operational funds.
The brutal mathematics of inequality
Consider a Quintile 1 school with an annual budget of R1.54-million, approximately R1,860 per learner, increasing by just 1.6% from 2024 to 2025, well below inflation. Compare this to elite schools with budgets approaching R40-million. This 26-fold inequality makes a mockery of educational equity.
This is the system working as designed: to sort, stratify and reproduce existing class hierarchies. The market model assumes competition drives improvement and choice enhances quality. But what choice exists when communities lack resources? What competition can occur when the playing field is tilted by decades of structural dispossession and allocations reinforcing historical inequalities?
The historical architecture of exclusion
Pamela Christie’s book, Decolonising Schools in South Africa: The Impossible Dream, demonstrates how these mechanisms extend the colonial project through contemporary economic architectures. The quintile system, introduced as progressive reform, has become a sophisticated mechanism for perpetuating inequality.
Relatedly, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital finds its most brutal manifestation here. Privileged schools operate as gatekeepers, transforming schools into zones of calculated opportunity hoarding, where opportunity evolves from a constitutional right into a carefully guarded privilege, inherited across generations.
The governance trap
The market model’s emphasis on decentralised governance through school governing bodies (SGBs) has amplified historical inequalities. This decentralisation assumed all communities possessed equal capacity for governance, ignoring how apartheid denied communities these skills.
Former Model C schools have SGBs with professional expertise that manage multimillion-rand budgets effectively. In contrast, most Quintile 1-3 schools have SGBs that, due to historical exclusion, lack technical expertise. Attempts to address this through public-private partnerships often remove agency from local populations. Parachuting in outside experts undermines community ownership. True development must emerge from within communities through sustained investment in building local capacity.
Towards liberation
What makes this particularly tragic is that such segregation is legal. The quintile classification system provides a legal framework allowing institutions to maintain privilege while appearing neutral.
This brings me to a personal reckoning. I taught in such schools. My son attends one. I grew up within these walls of privilege. Many teachers in these institutions genuinely care for those around them. This is not about casting stones, but recognising truth: when we limit opportunity based on economic circumstance rather than human potential, we impoverish an entire society. Privileged children grow up in artificial bubbles, unprepared for diverse realities. Under-resourced schools lose benefits from adequate investment. Both groups lose the richness of genuine integration.
The path forward requires confronting an uncomfortable truth: South Africa already allocates approximately 6% of its GDP to education, among the highest proportions globally. The crisis is not merely insufficient funding, but also how money is spent and misspent.
Rampant fraud and corruption in infrastructure projects and procurement siphon funds into private pockets. Catastrophic delivery failures reveal not just capacity problems but ethical breakdowns. Genuine transformation must address not only systemic design flaws but also corruption parasitising public education, demanding uncompromising commitment to ethics, transparency and accountability.
Transformation requires individual learner poverty assessments replacing crude community classifications, community-based governance capacity building through sustained training, state-guaranteed minimum funding based on costed norms, and democratic accountability mechanisms making allocations transparent. The state must resume its proper constitutional role while ensuring communities have both authority and capacity for participation.
Until we transform education from an economic sorting mechanism into a genuine vehicle for collective empowerment, we betray the promise of a truly democratic society. The community is watching. And history will judge. DM