We have the tool to fix SA’s education crisis — it’s right there in the Constitution

On 25 February 2026, the finance minister stood before Parliament and delivered a Budget speech steeped in the language of recovery. Debt stabilising for the first time in 17 years. A credit rating upgrade. A narrowing deficit. The message was unmistakable: South Africa has turned a corner.

The education figures were generous enough to generate headlines. Education, training and related functions remain the largest component of consolidated expenditure at 23.7% over the medium term, with R344.7-billion allocated to basic education.

The sector receives R22.7-billion in carry-through costs, the majority directed to early childhood development, which gets an additional R12.8-billion over three years to expand services to 300,000 more children.

The National School Nutrition Programme is aligned to food inflation; R9.9-billion supports employee compensation pressures; R342-million goes to progressively equalise Grade R teacher pay.

These are real numbers. But they are national numbers. And the deepest crisis in South African education has never been one of headline allocations. It is a provincial implementation catastrophe, where money approved in Parliament evaporates in the space between Treasury and classroom.

Here is what the Budget speech did not say. It did not say that in KwaZulu-Natal, no-fee pupils are funded at only 54.45% of the national threshold, receiving R955 per pupil against a target of R1,672.

It did not mention that this shortfall triggered a work-to-rule campaign during the June 2025 exams, that the premier had to pledge R900-million from other departments to stabilise the education system, or that 76 special schools were forced to close in October 2025 over unpaid subsidies.

It did not say that the Eastern Cape has withheld about R5-billion from schools since 2020, slashing allocations to as little as 50% of the mandated amount, and that a case challenging this is active in the Makhanda High Court.

It did not note that in the Northern Cape, schools had received only about 20% of their 2025 allocations by November. And it did not acknowledge what the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools confirmed late in 2025: that six of nine provinces failed to follow the prescribed payment schedule for school allocations.

The funding chain works like this: National Treasury allocates revenue to provinces through the provincial equitable share formula. The education component of this formula carries the largest weighting at 48%, calculated on school-age population and actual enrolment.

The Department of Basic Education then sets per-learner funding targets through the National Norms and Standards for School Funding, adjusted annually for inflation. Provinces are expected to meet these targets. Gauteng and the Western Cape consistently do.

KwaZulu-Natal has not met its obligations since 2015. Mpumalanga has fallen short since 2016, funding no-fee pupils at 82.7% of the threshold. The Northern Cape now allocates at about 48%. Between these three provinces alone, more than 4.25 million pupils are underfunded by an estimated R2.5-billion.

It must also be said plainly: even provinces that do meet the national funding threshold are not funding education adequately: R1,672 per pupil per year, which works out to R8.77 per school day, cannot cover the full operational costs of running a quality school.

I have argued elsewhere that South Africa needs to fundamentally reimagine how it funds education. The current norms were designed as a floor, but they have become a ceiling, and a low one at that.

This chronic underfunding creates the perfect conditions for extractive private providers and well-intentioned public-private partnerships to position themselves as saviours.

When the state cannot deliver textbooks or maintain buildings or pay utility bills, the door opens for outside actors to “intervene”. Some of these interventions are genuine. Many are not.

And regardless of intent, they carry a cost that is rarely acknowledged: they let provinces off the hook. Every service outsourced to a private provider is a constitutional obligation that the state no longer has to account for directly. The crisis becomes self-reinforcing. Provincial underfunding creates dependency, dependency attracts private capital, and private capital displaces the political pressure needed to fix the public system.

The May 2025 parliamentary oversight hearings laid this bare. The Financial and Fiscal Commission presented evidence that the quintile-based funding system relies on outdated poverty data and broad community indicators that misclassify schools.

Against this background, the 2026 Budget offers a revealing contrast. The minister spoke at length about fiscal discipline and growth-enhancing infrastructure. The Budget Facility for Infrastructure (BFI) has approved R21.9-billion for five major projects.

Public sector infrastructure spending will exceed R1-trillion over the medium term. The BFI call for proposals, published on Budget day, explicitly mentions courts, correctional facilities, police stations, tertiary institutions and hospital upgrades. It does not mention a single primary or secondary school.

School infrastructure, meanwhile, faces baseline reductions of nearly R1.2-billion over the next three years. In real terms, spending on school infrastructure will decrease by 8%. The Basic Education Employment Initiative has been drained from R6.5-billion in 2023 to R319-million this year.

Funza Lushaka bursary allocations have been cut. The education minister herself acknowledged a R120-billion infrastructure shortfall and warned that additional allocations “do not fully close the funding gap that has developed over many years”. These are not the signs of a system being repaired. They are the signs of a system being managed into deeper dysfunction.

The fundamental problem is constitutional design meeting fiscal reality. Education is a concurrent function. National sets policy; provinces implement. But when provinces fail to implement, national has limited enforcement power.

Of nationally raised revenue, 41.7% flows to provinces. What happens after that transfer is largely a provincial decision. At each decision point between provincial treasury and school gate, allocations can shrink, get delayed or disappear entirely.

Section 100 of the Constitution allows the national government to intervene when a province cannot or does not fulfil an executive obligation, and portfolio committee members have already asked why it has not been invoked for provinces that have spent a decade failing to meet the no-fee funding threshold.

What makes this particularly corrosive is the effect on people closest to classrooms. Across the country, the pattern repeats. Circuit managers are instructed by districts. Districts are constrained by what provincial head offices release. Teachers work without materials.

In KwaZulu-Natal, a principal in uThukela connected his school to a neighbour’s electricity because the department could not pay the municipal bill. In the Eastern Cape, principals described a culture of fear where raising concerns about underfunding risks professional isolation. The Budget speech speaks of accountability, but accountability flows upward from schools to the state, never downward from the state to schools.

The Budget allocated R2.7-billion to defence, R990-million to border management and R1-billion each to the police and the South African National Defence Force through the Criminal Assets Recovery Account.

These are political choices, made visible through budgetary allocation. They reveal what the government considers urgent. When the education section of the same speech contains no plan to address provincial noncompliance with funding norms, that absence is itself a political choice.

There are tools available. The Financial and Fiscal Commission has recommended a costed norms approach, where funding is based on what adequate education actually costs rather than on what provinces can afford after paying salaries.

It has proposed individual learner-based poverty indicators to replace the crude quintile system, which classifies schools by community rather than by the circumstances of the children sitting in them. None of these structural reforms appeared in the Budget speech.

The 2026 Budget will be remembered for stabilising debt and restoring fiscal credibility. These are real achievements. But fiscal credibility means nothing to a child sitting without textbooks in a school that has not received its allocation in six months.

The question is not whether South Africa can afford to fund education properly. At about 6% of GDP, we already spend among the highest proportions globally. The question is whether we have the political will to ensure that money reaches the classrooms where it is needed.

The constitutional tools exist. Section 100 was written for precisely this kind of provincial failure, where an executive obligation goes unfulfilled year after year while millions of children bear the cost.

Portfolio committee members have already asked why it has not been invoked. The evidence is on the parliamentary record. The funding shortfalls are documented. The provinces in chronic noncompliance are named. At some point, the refusal to act becomes its own form of complicity.

If the national government will not use the powers the Constitution gives it to protect the right to basic education, then every rand added to the education budget is simply accounting, celebrated in Parliament and invisible in the classrooms where it was supposed to arrive. DM

Pagiel Joshua Chetty is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town focusing on educational activism, institutional change and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.