School Fees in South Africa: Increasing quality or descreasing equality?

School Fees in South Africa: Increasing quality or decreasing equality? Introduction As the 2015 Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals deadline approaches, the issue of school fees and its connection to enrollment has increased in importance. Given that unenrolled children tend to be poor and less able to pay costs associated with education, school fees have come to be one of the major obstacles to the achievement of universal primary education. As such, the school fees issue has caused intense debate within the development community. Some development experts, including Luis Crouch and Penny Vinjevold and Paud Murphy, et al., have concluded that expanding access will not reduce inequality and poverty if the quality of education is low. On the other hand, opponents of school fees believe that they act as a barrier to education for poor children. School fees, argue experts such as Raja Bentaouet Kattan, Nicholas Burnett, and Jill Blackmore, further marginalize already vulnerable segments of the population and reinforce existing inequalities: wealthier communities are able to raise more funds, meaning the likelihood of a student attaining a certain stage of education becomes highly correlated with his/her family income level.