In 2017 the education sector reached a crossroad that will determine the future of education for the next decades. At the start of the school year tens of thousands of learners in Gauteng and Western Cape could not be placed in public schools. In the last quarter the state proposed new legislation to reduce the powers of School Governing Bodies (SGB’s) of public schools and to bring mainly unregulated homeschooling under...

By the weekend of the 10th of November the Department of Basic Education (DBE) was scrambling to deal with a tsunami of public comment on the draft Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill. By early Friday afternoon over 6000 comments were received and more were flooding in every minute. This wasn’t the nightmare the DBE expected when they quietly released the BELA Bill for comment on the 13th of October. But...