South Africa’s national schooling system is not producing the range and kind of skills required for meaningful socio-economic development in the country, the Production Management Institute (PMI) said on Thursday.

Strategic projects GM Johan Botha said that business throughout South Africa would “grind to a halt” if it had to wait for the country’s education system to produce the skills they needed.

This comes in the wake of ongoing criticism that the increased pass rate in the 2010 grade-12 results did not speak to any improvements in quality.

Botha pointed out that certain matric subjects, including mathematics, could be passed with marks as low as 30%.

“What this means is that it is okay to be wrong 70% of the time, and that is clearly unacceptable in the real world of business, where mistakes have serious, and even fatal, consequences.

“The reality of it is that a 30% or 40% success rate in the workplace environment would literally translate into miners trapped underground, workers falling off scaffolding and defective motor vehicles crashing on our roads. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Botha said that businesses should assume responsibility for solving the skills development challenges faced in the country, rather than relying on the national education and training system to do it for them.

He also pointed out that there were many financial and black economic empowerment (BEE) benefits that businesses could take advantage of when placing staff on workplace training programmes.

Learnerships through the relevant Sector Education and Training Authority attract a tax rebate of R60 000 for every learner who successfully completes a programme, which translates into a net tax recovery of about R16 800.

Further, if an organisation places black employees on learnerships to the extent of 5% of the workforce, they achieve maximum points on their broad based BEE scorecard under the learnership element.

“Last year, PMI saw some 100 employees from large manufacturing companies in the motor, food and beverages, paper, petroleum and pharmaceutical industries graduate with qualifications ranging from diplomas in production management to honours degrees in science,” said Botha.

He said that while the solution to the education crisis was as broad and multifaceted as the crisis, South Africa just did not have time to wait and had to start making work of it.

PMI is part of the Adcorp Group, listed on the JSE.