Abstract
Prior work on data obtained from the urban Johannesburg-Soweto based Birth to Twenty Plus (Bt20+) cohort has documented extensive levels of travel to school in the early post-apartheid era (1997–2003), with fewer than 20% of children attending the age-appropriate school closest to their home (de Kadt et al., 2014). These extremely high levels of schooling mobility impose costs on children and families, as well as the educational system more broadly, and have contributed to the evolution of contemporary enrolment patterns. This paper analyses the relationship between travel to school and potentially related variables at the individual, family and community level. Our analysis indicates that Black children, children attending higher quality schools, and those living in relatively poor areas were most likely to travel to school. However, while travel to school has a strong and positive univariate relationship with both maternal education and family socio-economic status (SES), this fades out in a multivariate analysis. Our findings highlight the significant costs incurred in the pursuit of high quality education by many Black children and families, as well as those living in poorer areas, in the early post-apartheid era. This is despite post-apartheid educational policy with an explicit aim of redress. The paper contributes to understanding the challenges of apartheid’s inequitable geographical legacy in ensuring equitable access to high quality education for all in South Africa, as well as to the growing literatures on the geography of education and school choice in low and middle income countries.
Highlights
The geographical location of schools within, and beyond, communities and neighbourhoods is one of the core strands of the growing literature on the geography of education (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Holloway and Jöns, 2012; Pini et al, 2017)
Across all measures of mobility examined, there was clear evidence that Black children were significantly more likely to travel further than children of other race groups. This reflects the persistence of apartheid era geography into the early post-apartheid era, and makes clear the racially differentiated costs imposed on South African families in pursuit of high quality schooling for their children
The extent to which mobility appears to cut across class and other social divides is simultaneously potentially slightly encouraging, as it may offer some protection to disadvantaged schools from the ‘race to the bottom’ described in Southall (2016). This analysis investigated the relationship between travel to school and a range of individual, household and community level variables for a cohort of children living in early post-apartheid Johannesburg-Soweto, South Africa over the period of primary school attendance
Summary
The geographical location of schools within, and beyond, communities and neighbourhoods is one of the core strands of the growing literature on the geography of education (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Holloway and Jöns, 2012; Pini et al, 2017). This paper uses population level data, collected from a dense urban area in South Africa’s Gauteng province in the early post-apartheid era, to explore predictors of the highly variable distances travelled to school by primary school children. Previous work on this cohort documented extensive travel to school, with fewer than 20% of children attending the age-appropriate school closest to their home (de Kadt et al, 2014). These patterns relate to the legacies of apartheid in the South African schooling system, as well as in the geography of its cities
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