As schools across South Africa settle into the 2025 academic year, a new education law remains the subject of much debate and controversy.
The Basic Education Laws Amendment bill, or Bela bill, was published as a draft in May 2022. By February 2023, it had attracted more than 29 000 public comments, many of which expressed concern about the proposed changes.
Nevertheless, parliament passed the bill in May 2024, and president Cyril Ramaphosa signed it into law on 13 September.
However, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and civil rights organisation AfriForum have tried to block the act’s implementation. In November, the DA – despite being in government – organised a protest march in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa.
What is the Bela Act?
The new law proposes amendments to the South African Schools Act of 1996 and the Employment of Educators Act of 1998. According to the Department of Basic Education (DBE), the Bela Act focuses primarily on “administrative and management processes” at the school level.
The government argues that while there’s been progress in widening access to education for the country’s children, there are still many barriers that the law seeks to address.
Key components of the new law include revising existing school admission and language policies, regulating homeschooling and extending the number of years of compulsory schooling. Others introduce jail terms for parents who do not send their children to school and revise the definition of corporal punishment to include non-physical forms of punishment.
What are the contentious parts?
The law has been dogged by false information, including that it will give schools control over gender-affirming healthcare for pupils and also allow teachers to facilitate abortions for pupils.
Africa Check fact-checked these types of claims and found they were unsubstantiated.
But the most controversial clauses have been 4 and 5 of the act, so much so that the president delayed their implementation for three months for consultations.
The DA, for example, says these “give the state too much control over who gets an education at any particular school, and in what language”.
Section 4 gives the DBE greater powers over school admission policies. Specifically, it allows the department to monitor how schools admit children to promote inclusivity and consider vulnerable children, among other things.
However, critics argue that it reduces the autonomy of school governing bodies (SGBs) to make decisions tailored to their specific communities.
Section 5 requires SGBs to submit their language policies for government approval to meet the linguistic needs of the wider community. The government believes this will help to address historical language-based exclusions. At the same time, critics fear it could undermine certain pupils’ educational rights, like those who rely on Afrikaans as their primary language.
Why is language an important issue in South Africa?
Language has long been identified as one of the barriers to education in the country. This is because, historically, language disputes in “former white schools” have led to the exclusion of black pupils from “single-medium Afrikaans-language schools”, writes Dr Faranaaz Veriava.
Veriava is a senior lecturer in the Department of Private Law at the University of Pretoria and head of basic education at Section 27, which advocates for access to basic education.
Historically, SGBs have used their policy-making functions to decide who can access their schools.
Veriava told Africa Check that “SGBs still make policy, but they must follow human rights norms”. Where the DBE changes a school’s language policy, it should follow “very strict procedural requirements”.
Education expert Mary Metcalf said the act’s clauses actually stipulated that SGBs would still have control over language policies as long as they were approved by the head of the department and met constitutional requirements.
She said that the right to be taught in one’s home language, or mother tongue, would be protected by the constitution.
What else do experts say?
Although there has been a backlash against implementing the Bela Act in South Africa, some experts have noted the positive aspects of the new law.
“The Bela [Act] is really about the loss of power to control access to particular schools, especially in light of the government’s failure to build more schools,” Stellenbosch University’s Dr Jerome Joorst told Africa Check.
He said the Bela Act would provide “equal access for all to good quality schools”.
Dr Solange Rosa, director of the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town, writes that many children living in rural areas, for example, are turned away from schools because of previous rigid school policies.
However, the changes to the law don’t take away the SGBs’ role in these policies.
Other concerns
Concerns over the Bela Act go beyond admissions and language policies. Those who oppose the act fear that it will give the government the power to determine the curriculum of all schools, including the homeschooling sector.
But the DBE says the act does not include any curriculum-related matters.
Section 27 has also debunked this claim, explaining that parents who choose to homeschool will still have the right to choose the curriculum for their children as long as it is in the child’s best interest.
“The intention of this clause is not to control children’s education but to bring regulation to a sector which for the most part has been unregulated,” it said.
Africa Check has also seen claims of concerns around the introduction of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) into school curriculums and taught to pupils from a young age.
But according to the DBE, the act makes “no mention” of school subjects, including life orientation, which covers CSE.
“Should the state wish to change the curriculum to include CSE, they would have to meaningfully engage with stakeholders,” Section 27 adds.
This report was written by Africa Check., a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original piece on their website.
