Student representation has been conceptualised and studied in different ways and by different researchers for more than 10 years. However, there are too few meta-narrative reviews indicating the main developments that have taken place in student representative councils (SRCs). Against this background, this article offers a summary of the events…

Public higher education institutions in South Africa conduct Student Representative Council (SRC) elections yearly. However, there is a paucity of studies to determine factors that affect voter turnout in these elections. This descriptive quantitative study conducted an empirical analysis of factors influencing students' voter participation at…

Being politically aware and participating in politics are essential determinants of a society's democratic survival. One source of concerns for researchers of political behavior regarding post-apartheid South Africa is the low rates of youth's political participation. There is however a dearth of empirical studies in the extant literature on the…

The Fallist movements of 2015/16 brought about rapid change to the South African higher education space, which required student leaders to reconsider their roles as agents of change and transformation. Student leaders contribute as stakeholders of and decision-makers in student governance, and some find themselves in a context where their working…

In the history of South African education there have been three contrasting attempts to incorporate learners into the authority structures of schools, namely: "boy-government" (prefect system), "student-government" (Student Representative Councils (SRCs)) and "learner-government" (Representative Councils of Learners…

Each secondary school in South Africa is legally obliged to establish a representative council of learners, a democratically elected, learner-only council. This article looks at how the representative councils of learners are realised in practice in four secondary schools. Three research questions focus on the practice of representative councils…

Learner participation in South Africa was legislated in 1996 through the South African Schools Act, No. 84. Since then it has been a legal requirement to establish representative councils of learners (RCL) at secondary schools (with Grade 8 and higher) countrywide. I investigate the perspectives and experiences of participation with secondary…

The racial desegregation of the student bodies of historically white universities in South Africa has had significant political implications for student politics and university governance. I discuss two key moments in the governance history of the University of Cape Town (UCT) critically. The first involves the experience of racial parallelism in…