SCHOOLS are facing an enrolment crisis in January because a six-year-old has forced the government to tear up rules about the school starting age brought in last year.

Talya Harris, the pupil at the centre of the controversy, took South Africa’s education minister to court over her right to start school this year at five because she was school-ready. The battle went to the Constitutional Court and she won a widely welcomed victory last month, prompting the government to relax the rules.

But the Harris case, which followed a decision by minister Kader Asmal to raise the school starting age to the calendar year in which a child turns seven, places pressure on schools to enrol huge grade-one classes in January comprising both six-year-olds and school-ready five-year-olds who were not allowed to enrol in 2001.

The government’s new rules were prompted by the fact that most black children do not get pre-schooling, making them ill-prepared for school at five-turning-six. The upshot was that many black pupils had to repeat the early grades, keeping them in school longer and costing the cash-strapped state more. A recent study of 277 schools countrywide showed one-quarter of children failed at least two primary years.

Talya’s mother, Doreen Harris, challenged the validity of Professor Asmal’s age order and won a high court case earlier this year. The court decided that Talya, who was 11 days too young to enrol in a Johannesburg school in January, had been unfairly discriminated against and that the age rules were unconstitutional.

Professor Asmal appealed in the Constitutional Court, but lost there too when Justice Albie Sachs dismissed the case. The judge argued that the case should not be decided by constitutional issues but on whether the National Education Policy Act gave the minister the power to issue the age notice. He found that the Act gave Professor Asmal powers to determine policy but not to impose binding law.

Afterwards, the education minister told the media he was disappointed that his appeal had lost on an “essentially technical ground”, that he was reconsidering the six-turning-seven age policy, and that in the meantime it should be “relaxed” in schools.

Deviation from the policy will be at the discretion of provincial ministers but Professor Asmal was reported as saying that parents could apply only if their child was “ready for grade one” and they could “show that the refusal to be admitted on this basis would be detrimental to the child’s development”.

Equity concerns may now prompt the government to speed up its ambitious early childhood development programme, which aims to alleviate the gap between poor and wealthier children.