Access to education is one of a range of social citizenship rights that are intended to afford members of a society an opportunity to share in a basic level of social, economic, and cultural well-being and to mitigate societal inequalities. The idea that every individual has a right to education is deeply entrenched in the international discourse on educational opportunity and inequality. The scholarly discourse on educational inequality in South Africa has called for and evolved toward broader, more nuanced conceptualizations of access to education. In this chapter, the authors examine the evolution of conceptualizations of access to education in South Africa. They review the literature on educational access and inequality and analyze the ways in which it has interpreted and applied social justice frameworks to examine the extent to which postapartheid South Africa is honoring its citizenship guarantees and social justice commitments by offering all South Africans meaningful access to quality education. They first discuss a conceptual framework that integrates two distinct but complementary dimensions of social justice (i.e., distributional justice and relational justice). Next, they illustrate how the evolution of conceptions of access to education has both informed and been informed by two streams of scholarship that invoke different dimensions of social justice to examine access to education in South Africa. They then discuss these distinct and contested interpretations of social justice in terms of their implications for what they understand about the educational opportunities and trajectories of disenfranchised groups who remain at the margins of the education system in the new democracy. They conclude by discussing challenges to and promising implications of research on access to education that incorporates an integrated, multidimensional social justice framework. (Contains 1 note.)