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...

Along with an assault on parent’s rights to run school governing bodies the Basic Education Department wants to hijack home education. But the department discovered that home invasion isn’t so easy. On Tuesday a flood of requests for an extension to the period for public comment on the new draft Basic Education Amendments Law (BELA) overwhelmed their systems. The department phoned Karin van Oostrum, Executive Officer of the Pestalozzi Trust, to...