This article is based on a year-long study of the right to education for child refugees and migrants from other African countries who find themselves in South Africa. It identifies a number of factors that inhibit children’s participation in education and shows how the right to education can be assessed and monitored using indicators.

This article explores the increasing privatisation of education. It examines various criticisms of the private provision of education and claims that privatisation is driven by an ideological agenda which is generally uncaring about any notion of the “public good” purposes of education — that is, of its role in producing social cohesion through the provision of education that is of high quality for all members of society.

This issue of the INTERIGHTS Bulletin focuses on litigating the right to education in Africa. It includes the following articles:

Litigating the Right to Education: Editorial
Solomon Sacco and Susie Talbot

Africa and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Malcolm Langford and Rebecca Brown

Litigating the Right to Universal Primary Education: Challenges and Prospects
Iain Byrne

Toward Recognition of the Right to Free Education in Colombia
Esteban Hoyos-Ceballos and Camilo Castillo-Sánchez

Expropriation as a Means to Protect the Right to Basic Education: The Case of a Farm School on Private Property Facing Eviction
Dmitri Holtzman

Lessons from Litigating Universal Primary Education in Swaziland
Ruchi Parekh

Developing a Litigation Strategy Regarding Non-Fee Barriers to Equal Access to Free and Compulsory Education for Children in Kenya
Hellen Mutellah

Litigating the Expulsion of Pregnant Girls
Solomon Sacco

Tactics to Secure the Right to Education for Children Living with Albinism in Kenya
Gertrude N Angote

Dzvova v Minister of Education, Sports and Culture & Ors
Bellinda Chinowawa

Republic v Head Teacher, Kenya High School, ex parte SMY
Charlotte Leslie

The Legal Way of Doing Things: The Competing Powers of School Governing Bodies and Education Authorities in South Africa
Karabo Ngidi

The ECOWAS Decision on the Right to Education in SERAP v Nigeria
Adetokunbo Mumuni and Chinyere Nwafor

Advancing the Right to Education Through the Communication Procedure in the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child
Charlotte Leslie

This publication is intended to support everybody that works in the basic education field in South Africa. It aims to provide a common legally grounded planning, monitoring and advocacy framework that is child-centred and recognises the interconnectedness of human rights.

This booklet brings together educators from different countries to examine the negative effects of privatisation on the right to education, education quality, equity, and teaching. Building upon specific examples from the US, Canada, Chile and South Africa, it makes the argument that privatisation increases inequality and stratification in education, and substitutes good public policy with the vagaries of charity or the single-mindedness of profit-making.

This report was submitted to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a contribution to a Day of General Discussion on the right to education for persons with disabilities to be held on 15 April 2015.

The reports highlights the systemic failure of the South African government to adequately provide for learners with disabilities.  In particular, many learners with disabilities are not getting access to an education.  These learners are not being screened and placed in appropriate schools, and in many instances are not in any schools.  Even where learners are placed in schools the failure to accommodate their needs means that they do not have meaningful access to education because they are not provided with, for instance, accessible learning materials, appropriately qualified teachers and safe and accessible infrastructure.  The ongoing failure to prioritise special needs education, and a lack of understanding of the needs of learners with disabilities, has resulted in the inadequate budgeting and provisioning for learners with disabilities. Finally, there is a lack of expertise amongst teachers and other staff at special needs schools, as well as officials within education departments responsible for developing and implementing policies to accommodate learners with special needs.

South Africa is in the unique posi­tion of hav­ing the right to edu­ca­tion guar­an­teed in the Con­sti­tu­tion. The law has been used to advance this right by trans­lat­ing what is on paper into a real­ity for thou­sands of learn­ers across the coun­try. The LRC and part­ners have been at the fore­front of civil soci­ety efforts in achiev­ing this. We wanted to share our suc­cesses.

In Octo­ber 2013, the Legal Resources Cen­tre was proud to launch Ready to Learn? A Legal Resource for Real­is­ing the Right to Edu­ca­tion at the Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tions in New York (find the press release here). The book was designed for legal prac­ti­tion­ers and shares the LRC’s legal efforts to con­tribute to real­is­ing the right to edu­ca­tion in South Africa. Ready to Learn?

Fight­ing to Learn… A Legal Resource for Real­is­ing the Right to Edu­ca­tion is the fol­low on from Ready to Learn? Using the same for­mat as the first pub­li­ca­tion,Fight­ing to Learn… gives an update on many of the cases rep­re­sented in Ready to Learn? and pro­vides a more gen­eral reflec­tion on the role of edu­ca­tion in the devel­op­ment agenda.

In Fight­ing to Learn…, prac­ti­tion­ers of law in other juris­dic­tions can access a sum­mary and court papers relat­ing to the pro­vi­sion of class­room fur­ni­ture, access to learner-support mate­r­ial and the pay­ment and appoint­ment of teach­ers. It also gives follow-up mate­ri­als for the “mud schools” mat­ter and norms and stan­dards for edu­ca­tion.

It demon­strates how the Con­sti­tu­tional right to edu­ca­tion was inte­gral to our fight for a qual­ity edu­ca­tion that is acces­si­ble to all. It also demon­strates the cre­ativ­ity of LRC lawyers in their work, from using class actions, which is new in South Africa, to our increas­ing use of inno­v­a­tive reme­dies, such as using exter­nal admin­is­tra­tors to imple­ment court judg­ments.

 

 
Two decades after Apartheid was apolished, Some Children are More Equal than Others focuses on how the educational system in South Africa relates to the flagrant inequalities in the country and its still growing wealth-gap. In a nutshell, education in SA operates as a "Tale of two Systems." On the one hand there are 20 % of privileged people who send their children to a functioning schooling system. On the other hand, education is drastically failing 80 % of the children in South Africa. This self-perpetuating circle results in over 50 % youth-unemployment. The serious challenge of fixing the educational system is over-due and it is up to everyone to stand up for their right for basic education, a right enshrined in the constitution of South Africa.

Some Children are More Equal than Others is an independently produced one-man-film-project and was realized as a non-commercial documentary film. The human rights law firm "Legal Resources Centre" generously supported the filmmaker in order to raise awarness of the challenges faced in making South Africa a better place.

This 94-page report found that South Africa has failed to guarantee the right to education for many of the country’s children and young adults due to widespread discrimination against children with disabilities in enrolment decisions. Human Rights Watch research in five out of South Africa’s nine provinces showed that children with disabilities face discriminatory physical and attitudinal barriers, often beginning early in children’s lives when government officials classify them according to their disabilities. 

‘This study is about the impacts of strategic litigation on equal access to quality education in Brazil, India, and South Africa. It is intended to look beyond strategic litigation solely as a means to ensure equal access to education, and to examine the use and effectiveness of strategic litigation in advancing education quality once access is won. This study is the second in a series of four thematic studies undertaken by the Open Society Justice Initiative and independent experts in 2014-2016 to interrogate the impacts of strategic litigation as a catalyst for social change.’

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