KZN education department settles in row over ranking.

Six impoverished schools that have been locked in a two-year legal battle with the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education over their subsidy allocations received good news this week.

Phoenix Heights Primary, Brailsford Primary, Olympia Primary and Highstone Primary, all in Phoenix, as well as Lotus Primary in Chatsworth and Buffelsdale Secondary in Tongaat - all of which received the lowest amount of state funding - challenged the department's ranking, which placed them among the richest schools in the province.

Government schools are currently rated according to a quintile ranking system whereby schools are ranked between one, regarded as the most poverty-stricken and having the least infrastructure such as roads, and five, regarded as being the least poverty- stricken.

The ranking determines how much state funding a school receives. All six schools were ranked as quintile five.

Assisted by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), the schools contended that the ranking allocated to them amounted to a distortion of the reality of the poverty of their pupils and that the regulations of the system were irrational.

The LRC's Mahendra Chetty told the Sunday Times Extra this week that the department wanted to settle the matter out of court. He said the department would indicate a settlement figure.

In court papers submitted to the High Court in Durban, the schools stated that their financial allocation should be reviewed because they had been allocated funding based on the assumption that they were among the most affluent schools "when, in fact, they are impoverished and serve communities with low levels of income".

The schools claimed that they should be ranked below five and wanted compensation for the 2007 and 2008 financial years. The schools said that they served communities which were historically disadvantaged and economically depressed with high levels of unemployment. They said that they had insufficient resources to provide the necessities of education, to repair buildings and, in some cases, to pay utility bills.

"Schools are denied access to the state's feeding plan. Some of the pupils attending the schools do not have access to sufficient food. There are instances of pupils falling asleep in class as a result of their under-nourishment," they said.

Phoenix Heights governing body chairperson Kalay Rani Govender said that the school serviced the poorest of the poor in adjoiningtownships and informal settlements. "Children come from child-headed homes, and the vast majority of parents are unemployed," said Govender.

Buffelsdale Secondary principal Vish Naidoo said that many of his pupils were from informal settlements, and being ranked quintile five prevented them from providing adequate education.

Provincial education spokesman Mbali Thusi said: "Quintile five areas are wealthy areas, and pupils that leave schools in their own communities to go to schools that are located in well-off areas are funded according to the poverty of the community where the school is located, not where they come from.

"The system to fund schools is based on the constitutional right to redress of the past inequality in funding in order to ensure the proper exercise of pupil rights to quality education. The funding of schools is based on the poverty of the surrounding community where the school is located, not the poverty of the pupils in the school. The matter was settled and the schools accepted the terms of the settlement."

By Teneshia Naidoo