Legal literacy is an essential tool of rights-based struggles. Legal literacy seeks to empower people and communities without any formal legal training to know and understand the law and its impact, so that they can engage and apply the law in a manner that improves the quality of their lives.

This is the purpose of the Basic Education Rights Handbook. It aims to empower communities, school governing bodies, principals, teachers and learners to understand education law and policy, and to know when learners’ rights have been violated and what steps are required to protect those rights.

For example, poor parents who know they have the right to apply for an exemption from school fees can resist efforts by a school to turn their child away because they cannot afford the fees being charged. Instead, parents can demand the opportunity to apply for the exemption.

This Basic Education Rights Handbook aims to be as comprehensive and inclusive as possible, by discussing a wide spectrum of areas of education law that potentially have an impact on learners’ rights. Each chapter provides an overview of the law, policy and case law on a particular issue, and uses real-life examples that give context to the issue under discussion.

Finally, each chapter provides the user with tools for remedying issues that may arise in respect of the area under discussion.

This Basic Education Rights Handbook was conceptualised and edited by the SECTION27 team, but is the result of collaboration between many civil-society organisations involved in education-rights activism, litigation and advocacy.

Click here for more information, or to view the individual chapters of the Basic Education Rights Handbook.