The government will be taken to court after accusations that it pacified unions by deciding to close all public schools for four weeks, less than a month after it won a legal challenge to its decision to reopen the country’s economy along with its schools.

The about-turn followed intense pressure from teachers’ unions, resulting in President Cyril Ramaphosa's announcement last week that public schools would be closed until 24 August, a move that will push the academic year beyond the end of 2020.

Business Day says concerns have been raised about the effect on child development in an already substantially unequal country, and the economic effect of closing schools.

The DA on Friday said it would lodge a court application on the grounds that the decision was not based on scientific evidence, and was not in the interest of SA’s 14m schoolchildren.

DA leader John Steenhuisen said the cost of closing schools was profound and would be borne by children and families for many years.

‘Many children will drop out of school never to return, and many more will fall so far behind that they are never able to catch up. Inequality in our society will increase, as poorer families are not able to provide any at-home learning, while more resourced families will naturally do whatever is possible to continue their children’s education even while schools are closed,’ he said.

The DA said that as soon as the closing of schools regulations have been gazetted, it would lodge its application.

The party has accused the government of letting politics dictate the decision by capitulating to teachers’ unions, particularly the SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), which is an affiliate of Cosatu, an ANC alliance partner, notes a second Business Day report.  

‘In bowing to this threatening interest group – a crucial component of the ANC’s political support base – the ANC is trampling on children’s consti tutional right to education, which recognises that education is fundamentally important to a child’s health, food security, future earnings and safety,’ Steenhuisen is quoted as saying.

He said the government has ignored all scientific advice because the Ministerial Advisory Council, as well as the SA Paediatric Association and the American Association of Paediatrics, have come out in strong support of schools being open.

‘Governing body associations, NGOs and medical specialists have argued to keep schools open, but these arguments have been swept aside on a wave of political expediency,’ Steenhuisen said.

The schools shutdown will push the academic year beyond the end of 2020.

Teachers’ unions have been calling for schools to be closed for the second time since the country went into lockdown in late March, amid a surge in the number of Covid-19 cases.

The long-term consequences of the additional school closure will hit SA hard, according to Servaas van der Berg, professor in economics at Stellenbosch University and the SA national research chair in the economics of social policy. These include problems such as lost learning time for children, felt most keenly by the poorest learners, who do not have the resources – such as ready access to the Internet – to supplement learning, which deepens inequality within the school system and, ultimately, the wider economy, he said.

The Business Day report says in a paper co-authored with economist Nic Spaull, written before the latest school closure, they referenced assessment data from the US, which showed that Covid-19 could result in a child losing about half of their mathematics progress and about a third of their reading progress.

But these effects are likely to be drastically under-estimated in SA’s case due to ‘the low levels of educational materials at home, the lack of educational technology such as computers and the Internet, and the inability of most SA teachers to continue teaching while children are not at school’, Van der Berg and Spaull said.

They estimated for the poorest 80% of learners in SA virtually no curricular learning was taking place under lockdown. 

First Business Day report

Second Business Day report