A system in survival mode: When no-fee schools aren’t free

It is the beginning of the school year. Two primary school children sit at their desks, eager to start the term. Their teacher walks down the aisle, handing out textbooks. She reaches them, but passes by. Again and again, in every class, they are skipped. Their classmates turn pages, start exercises and whisper excitedly, while their own desks remain empty. The school has withheld their textbooks because their parents fell behind on fees, and attempts to negotiate even a partial payment were refused by the school.

Let us be clear: the actions of this school are unjustifiable and a gross violation of the right to basic education, but they are also a symptom of a larger problem. As education budgets shrink, schools are increasingly turning to unlawful practices to secure funding.

What we are seeing: Advice clinics as an early warning system

Since January 2026, more than 50 parents and pupils have sought assistance from the Equal Education Law Centre’s advice clinic regarding unlawful fee practices. These matters include the withholding of reports, textbooks and transfer cards; exclusion from class over unpaid school fees; the blanket refusal or miscalculation of fee exemptions; no-fee schools enforcing “voluntary” contributions as mandatory; school governing bodies acting as debt collectors; and pupils forced to pay for cooking gas to access school meals. Strikingly, most cases arise in no-fee schools.

In a country where 37.9% of people live below the lower-bound poverty line, forcing trade-offs between food and other essentials, and 66.7% below the upper bound, it is no surprise that the main reason given for not attending school is a lack of money.

What begins at first as a single story reveals, through repetition, a systemic trend, reflecting pressure points of an increasingly deprioritised education system. In this way, our advice clinic becomes an early warning system – registering how financial strain on schools translates into unlawful demands and financial strain on families. The stories are personal, but the pattern is structural: desperate institutions responding to scarcity in ways that shift the burden onto those least able to carry it.

How we got here: per-pupil spending and the slow erosion of adequacy

Public school funding is meant to be redistributive: schools serving poorer communities receive more per pupil and are not supposed to charge fees. But this system only works if provinces actually meet the minimum funding thresholds set nationally. Increasingly, they do not.

A 2025 Department of Basic Education presentation shows severe underfunding in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape. Northern Cape no-fee schools receive only 48% of their per-pupil allocation, while those in KZN receive 54%. This affects more than 3.5 million no-fee pupils in these provinces alone and means that the poorest schools are operating on roughly half the budget they are meant to have. This does not even address whether the national targets themselves are adequate to begin with (they are not).

The law allows no-fee schools to charge fees if provinces underfund them, but only to cover the shortfall. In practice, this creates a perverse outcome: in provinces that fail to meet their obligations, the very idea of “no-fee schooling” begins to collapse, and the right to free basic education rings hollow.

The problem is not only how much is allocated, but whether funds arrive at all. In 2025, six of the nine provinces missed the 15 May deadline for paying the first tranche of the per-pupil allocation to schools. The Northern Cape failed to make even the final tranche payment in November 2024, allegedly due to budget constraints. While the state delays its payments, schools cannot choose to defer their obligations to service providers, utilities and creditors.

Following the money: Where the moral responsibility really sits

Since 2013, cuts to social spending have steadily eroded the foundation of public education. According to the Department of Basic Education, 2025 education budgets (in real terms) were lower than they were almost a decade ago, even though between 2019 and 2024 the pupil population grew by almost 300,000. Per-pupil spending has declined year after year, and once rising education costs are accounted for, the shortfall is even deeper. The government itself estimates cumulative budget pressures of R118-billion over the current period.

Provinces have repeatedly sounded this alarm, as they run out of funds to pay for books and stationery, scholar transport programmes get cut, thousands of teachers lose their jobs amid an overcrowding crisis, and 15,000 much-needed teaching posts stay empty.

It is tempting to attribute this to mismanagement or corruption alone. But even in a system where every rand was spent perfectly, the vast gap would remain. The baseline allocation to public education is simply too low to meet existing obligations, let alone growing demand.

So, where does the responsibility sit? Treasury makes the decision; schools, under impossible constraints, bend and sometimes break the law; and the consequences are carried by the child whose desk remains empty. The unlawful act may occur at the school level, but the moral responsibility for it does not.

Normalising a system in survival mode

Most serious harm in public systems is not caused by cruelty. It happens when people are placed in situations where every available option causes harm. Do we force pupils to pay for cooking gas so they can receive meals, or do we run out of gas and feed no one? Choosing the least-damaging option becomes a way of getting through the day. Over time, that harm becomes normal. Rules are bent, lines blur and actions that once felt unthinkable start to feel necessary, while the state benefits from the poorest picking up bills that it should be budgeting for.

This is what chronic underfunding does. It creates shortages and impossible choices. Schools are expected to keep classrooms open, protect pupils and comply with the law, without the resources to do all three at once. When rules are bent and laws broken, it is not because standards no longer matter. It is because the system has made full compliance incompatible with survival.

The shortfall does not remain in spreadsheets. It is absorbed by schools, families and, ultimately, pupils. Most insidious of all, it relocates responsibility, until those with the least decision-making power are forced to carry the consequences of decisions made far above them. The government has simply decided where the harm will land. DM

Katherine Sutherland is head of research and advocacy at the Equal Education Law Centre.