Eastern Cape schools take Education Department to court

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The Grahamstown High Court will hear argument on Thursday in the first opt-in class action of its kind in South Africa.

The class action is being spearheaded by the Legal Resources Centre on behalf of 58 schools, who are owed millions of rands by the Department of Basic Education.

The Centre says that over the past few years, the Department declared that individual schools were entitled to a certain numbers of educators, but then failed to appoint the necessary number of teachers to fill those posts.

Schools then paid those teachers from their own funds and now want to recover more than 81-million rand from the Department of Basic Education.