7 October 2025
Equal Education (EE) and the Equal Education Law Centre (EELC) welcome the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) decision to extend the deadline for public comment for the Draft Regulations on the Admission of Learners to Public Schools and the Draft Regulations on Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for the Capacity of Ordinary Public Schools (the Draft Regulations) to 5 December 2025. However, we strongly urge that this extension not be just an administrative step. The DBE must use it to actively engage the communities that have been left out so far – particularly Black and working-class communities who are most affected by the education crisis.
On 27 September, EE and the EELC hosted an open public meeting in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, to engage parents, learners, and members of the broader school community on the Draft Regulations. The meeting provided a powerful platform for school communities to break down the content of the Drafts, voice their frustrations around overcrowding, unfair admissions practices, inequitable budget allocations, and propose meaningful changes to the Draft Regulations.
School-going learners from several townships in Ekurhuleni reflected that overcrowding is a major issue that they currently face and a significant barrier to accessing their right to basic education. They reflected that overcrowding makes it hard to teach and learn effectively because it is difficult to concentrate in a classroom that has over 60 learners. This leaves them feeling demotivated, neglected and disengaged from learning, often causing them to fall behind with school work, and contributing to high failure rates. Learners also raised concerns about the undignified conditions of their school infrastructure, emphasising that the infrastructure is being overused, resulting in it breaking frequently and constantly needing maintenance.
Additionally, community members raised concerns that school governing bodies from under-resourced schools – unlike those from affluent schools – lack the resources to facilitate their admissions process. This leads to unfair placement processes, such as pressure to admit more learners than the school can accommodate. Parents highlighted the gaps in the Draft Regulations in solving some of these challenges and the missed opportunities in taking significant steps towards transforming how learners access education. They highlighted a tendency to exclude the parents and caregivers of Black children from key conversations, citing the development and implementation of a confusing and inaccessible online admissions system in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Parents demand that the development of the Draft Regulations do not leave them behind! These testimonies underscored the urgent need for the robust regulations that EE and the EELC have long advocated for.
A key criticism from communities was the government’s failure to make the Draft Regulations accessible and to create spaces for communities to understand them. Participants highlighted that the DBE has made no real effort to thoroughly explain the dense legal documents or guide the public on submitting comments, effectively silencing the very voices the public comment process is meant to capture. This, despite the DBE announcing that “it would be embarking on a national public awareness campaign to ensure that the content of the draft regulations is well understood and that all interested parties are empowered to make informed submissions”.
“It is so sad that it had to be Equal Education and not the DBE that had to start the initiative of doing public engagements on these important regulations. Such important documents are supposed to reach communities on time so that they are well-workshopped and well understood. This allows community members to fully engage and shape the regulations. Community members were not aware of these regulations and did not know where to access them. When they had accessed them through Equal Education, they were not translated into other African languages for better understanding. The DBE must do public engagements on these regulations because they play a vital role nationally, and many people are not aware of them, even schools.” – Mam’ Jacobeth Mofokeng, EE Gauteng Parent
The government’s current approach to public participation is exclusionary. This extension offers a crucial opportunity to correct that and to genuinely listen to those whose lives will be most affected by these regulations. This issue is highlighted by the decision to translate the Draft Regulations into Afrikaans, spoken by roughly 10% of the population, while the rest of the country must navigate only the English version of these Regulations.
We call on the DBE to use the extended period to launch a robust, accessible, and dynamic public engagement campaign, including translating the Draft Regulations into other official South African languages. The DBE must actively engage communities, explain the regulations in plain language, and actively facilitate the participation of those who have so far been on the fringes of their stakeholder engagement processes.
The feedback from this engagement was clear: the Draft Regulations mark an important milestone, but without meaningful input from affected communities, they risk being ineffective and falling short. EE and the EELC urge the DBE to use the extended deadline to ensure the final regulations are shaped and strengthened by the people they are intended to serve.
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To arrange a media interview, contact:
- Sesethu August (Equal Education Communications Officer) sesethu@equaleducation.org.za or 063 221 7983
- Jay-Dee Booysen (Equal Education Law Centre Media and Communications Specialist) jay-dee@eelawcentre.org.za or 082 924 1352