Poverty index to determine no-fee status

from Independent On Line

By Amelia Naidoo

A Quarter of KwaZulu-Natal's schools are located within communities living below the poverty line, prompting the Education Department to re-rank its schools into five categories according to a poverty index and to declare half the province's schools to be no-fee schools.

Speaking before the start of the new school year on Wednesday, Education MEC Ina Cronje said on Tuesday that 24.2 percent of the schools - about 1 400 - fell into quintile one (used to classify the poorest regions), and were mainly from the Msinga Municipality.

All the schools there were no-fee schools. The region's education and income levels were dismal, with a 23.85 percent literacy level, R2 283.89 average income a year and a dependency of 89 people a household.

She said the department decided to rank schools based on poverty levels rather than on the infrastructure of schools, as the economic status of people living around the schools gave a better indication of how to allocate funding.

A warning was also issued to errant teachers who failed to attend school that their time had run out, with Cronje saying that the department would deal severely with them.

Cronje also said that more than half of the province's 6 000 schools had been declared no-fee schools this year, a steep increase from last year's 20 percent. She also slated about 230 schools which had missed the September 15 2006 deadline for ordering support material as "grossly irresponsible".