Managing a progressive educational agenda in post-Apartheid South Africa: the case of education public-private partnerships

In this chapter we focus on one of the more significant contemporary iterations of this discussion, that of governance and management of schools. We look critically at the public-private movement in school governance and consider how this development can be understood in the context of the country’s commitment to a progressive educational agenda of inclusion and equity and the provision of quality education. The struggle to transform and render public education equitable in the context of PPPs is one of fine balance between the imperative to improve and rescue urgently failing schools, and the need to strengthen public education by and through the state. This requires, at the very least, deliberate public policy dialogue about what is desirable in education reform and how to unpack the policy common sense that is now part of the education discourse in South Africa. But even more fundamentally, it requires aligning the constitutional vision of the post-apartheid society with the realities of implementation. Bold and ambitious pilots are required, but not those which in the long term will undermine the viability and ethos of a common public education system. In such debates, the state has to be transformed to take responsibility for protecting the right of all for equitable quality education, particularly the poor. The interregnum of collaboration schools offers the space to do this and to engage with the current governance policy logic which has education reform discourses in South Africa.