Radical education bill threatens parents’ rights

ChristianView Network yesterday [see YouTube clip at bottom of page] asked the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education to fix problems in the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill that would grab power away from parents.

The bill has drawn more public comment than any law since the Constitution. Parents’ backlash against a 2017 BELA Bill draft resulted in an unprecedented special inquiry from Parliament and a forced the Department of Basic Education to a re-think.

Our opinion piece in BizNews got around 6 000 social media shares. We argue that parents control of education is a fundamental right granted by God in the Bible, acknowledged by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Western Cape Constitution and essential to religious freedom.

The re-drafted bill fixes about half the problems but overall still means more power for politicians and less for parents.

Good news is that the government agreed school governing bodies can control teacher appointments and can verify parents ability to pay. Educators will no longer have to declare all finances. They have relaxed other provisions. For example penalties for unregistered home schooling are dropped from six years to one year; Provincial Education permission is needed to lease school properties for more than a year; home educators are required to report per phase instead of annually.

We argue parents, through the school governing body, should fully control admissions policy (this impacts financial viability, ethos and language policy), procurement, language policy and the code of conduct — while the BELA Bill shifts these powers to the state.

If the financial viability of the school is weakened it can mean that some extra teachers will lose their jobs. Proposals to force all school governing body members and their families to declare all financial interests, will mean many good people will avoid the role — and is totally unreasonable and unconstitutional given that they could rather simply declare any business with the school.

The 1976 riots were provoked by an attempt by the state to force language medium policy on schools. It is as wrong now as it was then. Parents should decide. We don’t believe any parent should go to jail for unregistered home schooling, as did home schooling pioneers Andre and Bokkie Meintjies under the apartheid government. Never again.

The proposed bill will mean more tax and make it harder to find a place in a school. BELA would require home schoolers to employ educational consultants to assess the progress of children, while such families are sacrificing one income already. It would also restrict their curriculum choice, which is the reason many home school anyway.

If home schooling is more difficult and expensive, many of the estimated 100 000 home schoolers will apply to public schools which do not have places to absorb them.

An army of bureaucrats will have to be employed to process home school assessments and the financial declarations of governing body members. The Department of Basic Education would need to upgrade their information technology Infrastructure to compare with SARS to keep this information secure. If they don’t, it will likely be hacked and they will face a POPI class action lawsuit.

We argue that schools should be allowed to have lease agreements with Independent schools and churches for up to three years or with six months’ notice, rather than for one year as the bill proposes. Sharing school facilities via leases are win-win for the school and community, who are also taxpayers. School halls are unused on Sundays and the most common venue for start-up churches.

Quarterly financial reports from independent schools would distract from teaching, when annual reports would be more reasonable. The BELA bill would give a blank cheque to the Department of Education to create additional regulations to make home education and the work of governing bodies more difficult. It forms part of a raft of legislation and policy that has been eroding parents rights over education since around 2003.

Other key problem policies include: The “safe sin” sex education scripted lesson plans; The Western Cape Gender Identity Policy; The 2003 Religion in Schools policy; The learner pregnancy policy.

The public hearings on the BELA bill will be streamed via the parliamentary YouTube channel and likely also via DSTV parliamentary channel 408 https://www.youtube.com/user/ParliamentofRSA

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