MORE than 400 Western Cape primary schools will scrap school fees from May 1. This will affect 15.9% of learners in the province. To compensate for the loss of income derived from fees, the Western Cape Education Department will top up these schools' funding for "non-capital, non-personnel expenditure" (or norms and standards funding) to R527 per learner per year.

For instance, Umnqophiso Primary levies school fees of R50 per learner per year, and receives a norms-and-standards allocation of R306 per learner per year (i.e. R356 per learner per year). If the school opts for no-fee status, its total allocation will be R527 per learner per year, i.e. at least R171 more per learner.

The WCED has approached Umnqophiso and 423 other schools to opt voluntarily for "no-fee" status this year. It is unlikely that any will refuse, given that they stand to be funded more.

The department will allocate R29 million during 2006/07 for this initiative, followed by R139m and R237m in 2007/08 and 2008/09 respectively. When the process is complete, about 37.6% of our learners will not be paying fees.

This is in line with the Education Laws Amendment Act no 24 of 2005 which allows the Minister of Education to identify schools that may not charge school fees. The minister was required to have published a list of no=fee schools in the Government Gazette before September 30, 2005. This would have enabled schools to know their funding allocations and plan in three-year cycles, in line with the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework.

The act was only signed by the president in January 2006, too late for the minister to publish the list of no-fee schools. As an interim measure for 2006, MECs and provincial education departments, and not the minister, identified the schools to become no-fee schools.

Seven provinces have identified no-fee schools (ranging from 588 in North West to 2 074 in the Eastern Cape). This affects about 6 975 out of some 27 000 schools. The remaining provinces are expected to identify no-fee schools shortly.

The response to no-fee schools has been mixed. It is more certain that a percentage of learners will have free education than that the injection of funding will improve quality much.

Some opposition centres on the view that subsidies should be allocated to individual learners, to allow poor learners to select schools of their choice. This was the view of political parties such as the DA and the ID and other groups such as the Governors' Alliance and the School Governing Board Federation. Some added that the cost of books, uniforms, nutrition and transport were also a barrier for learners which the policy did not address.

All of these groups advocated examining why the previous exemptions policy did not work in "a few cases", rather than scrapping it altogether, or said that schools which did not advise and assist poor parents with exemptions should be sanctioned.

Helen Zille, when she was a DA MP in 2005, pointed out that learners from poor backgrounds at schools in wealthier areas would not benefit.

ANC MPs Dan Montsitsi and Ismail Vadi say that, because of apartheid, "schools in the poorest areas need to be upgraded. This can only be done by declaring them no-fee schools with full funding".

Making the poorest 20% no-fee schools was a step towards meeting the ANC's goal of free education for all, they say.

Many members of the Portfolio Committee expressed concern that no-fee schools could be stigmatised as sub-standard.

The SA Democratic Teachers' Union had serious concerns about the practical outcomes. Non-fee-paying schools might become oversubscribed and neighbouring fee-paying schools suffer accordingly. Non-fee paying schools might find themselves reclassified from year to year, which was not sustainable.

Perhaps more crucially, Sadtu commented that non-personnel, non-capital expenditure had been significantly redistributed towards poorer schools, but accounted for only 10% of the education budget.

Personnel expenditure accounted for *5% and the post-provisioning formula favoured richer schools with larger subject offerings. Therefore wealthier schools received about the same number of posts as poorer schools. This, added to the school fees which wealthier schools collected, rendered the allocations comparatively insignificant.

This is contested by University of Pretoria's dean of education Professor J Jansen and by education researcher S van den Berg, who both say that education spending has been equalised. No matter which view is correct, what evidence is there that increased expenditure on non-capital, non-personnel items will lead to improved quality in education, and not just free education?

In a research report for the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation, Jansen says that concentrated, coherent and co-ordinated focus on three types of resource - teach quality, time on task and textbooks - together, will probably have more impact than any other.