Sue Blaine
23 August 2007
Johannesburg — THE National Credit Act, promulgated this year, was affecting the way schools policed the payment of fees, said Dr Jane Hofmeyr , executive director of the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa (Isasa), yesterday.
The act had effectively put a stop to the practice of giving discounts to parents who paid in full at the start of the year or penalising in monetary terms those who did not pay on time, she said.
Hofmeyr said the inadvertent effects of "intrusive policies" from various organs of state was one of several key challenges the association faced. "Government policy often has unintended consequences for schools," she said.
The association spent a large amount of time negotiating with municipalities to lessen the effect of changes in property rates that affected schools' working capital.
When St David's Marist Brothers in Inanda was started , it was established in an out of the way area, but metropolitan growth had meant the land was now in a sought after area, she said.
Isasa was going to put its energies over the next three years into helping its 600 member schools devise new ways of policing fee payment and dealing with the myriad other challenges they faced, said Hofmeyr.
The association is one of nine national associations representing about 2300 registered independent schools in SA.
The registered private school sector in SA quadrupled in size between 1994 and 2002. The largest growth was of schools that do not charge fees or charge up to R4400 a year.
Isasa would be working on supporting member schools and building their capacity to deal with an increasingly litigious society, but saw the biggest challenge in the introduction of the new state curriculum, the Revised National Curriculum Statement.
The first matric class to have followed the new curriculum from grade 1 to matric would write final exams in the new curriculum next year. T eachers and schools were still grappling with the radical changes in the way subjects were taught and pupils were assessed, Hofmeyr said.
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