:I am seeking legal advice regarding an issue with my children's (ages at the time, 8 and 10 respectively) previous school in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The main issues are: 1. Whilst our children were at the school, one of my daughters was repeatedly hit and beaten by a teacher at the school and the teacher was also verbally abusive as well. The school did not reprimand the teacher nor provide any written reports to ourselves as parents in how they had resolved the issues with the abusive teacher. They swept the issues under the carpet.

2. The school used both our daughters sporting extra curricular activities image and likeness which we provided to the school for information purposes only, to promote and market the school without our consent. When we brought up these issues with the school, they said that our daughters’ successes had a positive impact with the image of the school. We then began discussions with the school with regards to scholarships for our daughters whilst our image and likeness of our daughters were being used by the school.

3. At the beginning of the next School year and we were waiting for the School, we partially paid some of both our daughters school fees, but the School continued to use our image and likeness of our daughters without our consent. Because of this, we stopped paying our daughters School fees until this matter was resolved. The School were fully aware about this The school continued to procrastinate with the scholarship decision, this went on for close to a year.

During this period my daughters continued to attend school which the school were again, fully aware of. Eventually the school reverted back to us towards the end of the school year and apologised that our daughters could not be awarded scholarships as the school is an academic school that they do not award scholarships for sports. We therefore queried the school about why were our daughters image and likeness were used within the school, and on the school social media for marketing purposes without our consent? The school could not reply with a cohesive answer.

Following a meeting with the General Manager, we informed the school that our daughters would be leaving the school as they had opportunities elsewhere to receive sporting scholarships. The school general Manager advised us to email him the notice and that he would resolve the outstanding issues with the school fees on our behalf. After this final meeting, we did not receive any communication with the school or any form of recovery action as per the School fees either. And therefore our daughters had left the school.

Approximately three months later we emailed the school to send us our daughters exam results, but instead of sending us the results, the school has instructed a debt collection agency to recover school fees for the previous year including recovery action, blacklisting and Court summons. Therefore as per the issues that we have raised above, we would appreciate guidance on how to proceed legally to ensure the school desist from their actions and this matter is resolved succinctly.

Hi there and thank you for your question,

I am a practicing attorney based in South Africa and I will assist you with your question. Please feel free to ask as many follow up questions in order to clarify your question. If you have a new question, you must please open a new thread.

Please keep in mind that our discussions is for general information purposes only. Our engagement on this website does not create an attorney-client relationship. 

If a teacher physically abused or assaulted your child while at school, that would constitute a criminal offense and what you should be doing (over and above reporting it to the headmaster) is laying a criminal complaint against the teacher concerned. The criminal complaint should be about the beating, and the verbal abuse, has verbal abuse also constitutes assault!

The school is not able to blacklist you for an outstanding debt however the school can instruct a debt collector to see if the debt collector contract recover the debt directly from you, and if the debt collector cannot then the school can issue a summons against you. You should defend the summons on the basis that you have a counterclaim against the school, for essentially a royalty payment pertaining to the use of your daughters image in the marketing of the school. Just make sure that your counterclaim about exceeds the amount which the school is claiming from you by way of unpaid school fees. 

It will then be up to the school to take the matter to court and to prove its claim, and you will be able to prove your counterclaim as to the discussions about the scholarship and the delays all while the school continued to benefit from your daughter's images and likeness in the marketing efforts. 

This is obviously not going to be an easy claim, however in my opinion there is enough of a claim there to get past any default judgment or summary judgment that the school tries to apply for. The position will then be that the school will have to run a full trial against you if it wants to be paid the outstanding school fees. This will no certainly be a very costly exercise for the school; one which they will probably drop once the attorneys ask the school for a deposit to cover the advocates costs.