Who is out of school? Evidence from the Statistics South Africa Community Survey☆
Section snippets
Introduction and literature review
The right to a basic education has been guaranteed in the Constitution of the Republic of South African [section 29(1)] since 1996. The South African Schools Act (1996) [section 3(1)] makes it compulsory for all children to attend school from the first school day of the year in which they reach the age of seven years until the last school day of the year in which they reach the age of 15 or the end of Grade 9. This framework legislation embodies the South African government's commitment to the
Research method
The Community Survey 2007 was conducted by Statistics South Africa in February 2007. It was constituted by a two-stage stratified cluster sample design involving the drawing of the enumeration areas within municipalities in the first stage and drawing on dwelling units within selected enumeration areas in the second stage. Of a total of 79,466 enumeration areas, 17,098 were sampled. The sample size comprised 949,105 individuals from 246,618 households (StatsSA, 2009). The survey collected
Prevalence of children not attending school
Participation in South Africa's education system is very high. In 2007, almost 96% of children of compulsory school age were attending an educational institution (see Table 1). Since 2001 there has been an improvement in the participation rate of children in each age cohort between seven and 15 years. The biggest increase has been among seven year olds: between 2001 and 2007 the percentage of seven year olds attending school increased from 88.4% to 95.1%. The phasing in of a reception year
Conclusion
What does the Community Survey 2007 contribute to our understanding of trends in school attendance in South Africa? First, it provides us with a good estimate of the size of the group of children of compulsory school age who are not in school. While there continues to be some concern about the inconsistencies in the data for white and Indian children, the number of out-of-school compulsory school aged children is around 386,000. Second, it shows that enrolment rates have remained relatively
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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 10th UKFIET International Conference on Education and Development, 15–17 September 2009, New College, Oxford. Funding for the research project was provided by the National Research Foundation and CREATE, University of Sussex. The authors are exclusively responsible for the research presented in this paper.