Grade 1's at Mimosa School private school enjoy their first day of primary school in their classroom, 1 February 2020. Picture for illustration: Tracy Lee Stark
The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Wednesday filed papers at the Pretoria High Court in a bid to force government to scrap rotational learning and to direct schools to open fully immediately.
The DA has joined growing calls from teacher unions and education experts for government to end its current one-metre distance policy for schools, as well as rotational timetables.
The party says the policy, implemented at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, is unjustifiable and unconstitutional as it has long-lasting, possibly irreparable, damage to pupils’ education.
DA leader John Steenhuisen said over 80% of South African schools were still operating on a rotational basis, whereby each child only attends school half the time, on alternate days or weeks.
“It defies belief and strains sanity that some 80% of South African schoolchildren are still being denied half their schooling, on the (undeniably false) assumption that this is somehow beneficial to them or to society as a whole, on a balance of risks,” Steenhuisen said in a statement.
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He said rotational schooling was being implemented in order to satisfy government’s social distancing rule in classrooms, which is one metre for primary school children and one and a half metres for high school children.
“The rule is plainly unconstitutional. The rotational system massively violates children’s constitutional rights to basic education, basic nutrition, for children’s best interests to be paramount in all matters concerning them, and to equality.
“There would need to be a very strong justification for denying children these rights,” Steenhuisen said.
At the same time, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) also urged government to scrap rotational timetables for primary schools.
READ MORE: SAHRC calls for rotational classes to be scrapped
The commission said last year it was of the view that rotational timetables had “a long-lasting negative impact on learning”, as a large number of primary schools across the country continued with it.
The government’s own Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) advised in July last year already that all schools should open at full capacity, even where children are not able to be one metre apart in classrooms.
“The commission holds that rotational learning has a long-lasting negative impact on learning outcomes for children and, as the MAC’s [Ministerial Advisory Committee’s] advice states, that ‘the harms of learners attending school on a rotational basis — specifically the severe cognitive, nutritional, and psychosocial costs — exceed the benefits of reduced Covid-19 infections from smaller class sizes’,” the SAHRC said.
Compiled by Thapelo Lekabe
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