|
|
South Africa: Failure to Submit Accounts Hits School Finances
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Business Day (Johannesburg)
24 July 2008
Posted to the web 24 July 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
THE rapid turnover of school governing body (SGB) officials was part of the reason that many SGBs did not have the capacity to submit their school's financial statements properly, which meant that the school did not get its subsidy for the next year, said the secretary of the Gauteng branch of the National Association of SGBs, Matakanye Matakanye, yesterday.
About 135 Gauteng schools have not been paid their 2007-08 subsidy because they have not submitted their audited 2006-07 financial statement as required by the South African Schools Act (SASA), said Gauteng education department spokeswoman Nanagolo Leopeng.
This means the schools can not pay creditors. The department was in talks with the schools and had undertaken to release a portion of their subsidies so that they could function, Leopeng said.
The department had set aside R700m for the 625 schools that do not charge fees, and had paid out about R441m thus far, she said.
The SASA requires the submission of an audited financial statement at the end of each financial year, along with a budget for the next one, before a school's subsidy can be paid.
Despite the department's efforts to ensure that SGBs and school management teams were trained to meet the SASA's financial governance requirements, SGBs changed at least every three years. This turnover made it difficult to ensure schools had the capacity to comply with the legislation, said Matakanye.
While some public schools' parents were professional people able to meet the act's requirements, other schools' parents did not have the same capacities and the requirements were onerous, said University of the Witwatersrand education researcher Phillipa Tucker.
"You should see how much they have to wrap their heads around. The manual is about 700 pages long," she said.
The Matthew Goniwe School of Leadership and Governance tried to ensure it covered 80% of Gauteng's SGBs each year because of the high turnover in the bodies' members, said the school's chief operating officer Anusha Naidu .
|
The institution had been training an average of 100 Gauteng principals a year. But this year the department sponsored the training of 500 school principals, she said.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
