Cape Town 18 April 2000
Chairperson.
Honourable Members and Delegates.
I wish to begin by acknowledging, with great pleasure, the appointment of the Chairperson, Ms Naledi Pandor, to the high honour of Chancellor of Cape Technikon.
I was privileged to participate in your installation as Chancellor last Friday night. Your appointment is indeed a fitting tribute to one who has given so much to the cause of education in our new democracy, quite apart from your other signal contributions to Parliament and public life.
May I also acknowledge the passion and dedication you have brought to the role of Chairperson of the Tertiary Education Fund of South Africa, which administers the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. This is the main channel through which the government supports deserving students who do not have the means to finance their degree or diploma studies. I am delighted that we have again increased the level of public funding for NSFAS in 2000/2001.
Since the passage of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme Act last year, I have received nominations for membership of the new Board, and I look forward to announcing the appointments next month. Meanwhile, I thank you for your leadership of TEFSA, which has achieved a well-deserved reputation for managing a complex and strategically vital public financial institution with efficiency, sensitivity and integrity Chairperson, it has been the custom for this debate to focus on the condition of the provincial education systems, even though Vote 8 is the budgetary appropriation for the national education department. In fact, almost all of it represents transfer payments to the higher education system, which is an exclusive competence of the national level of government.
When I introduced the Education debate in the National Assembly on 14 March, I remarked that Vote 8 contains no funds to support provincial education systems, other than conditional grants to assist provincial education departments to carry forward innovative work in capacity building and quality improvement. In fact, the massive appropriations for provincial education are made by provincial legislatures out of the funds voted to them in the block grants to provinces.
I noted the disjunction between the political responsibility of the Minister of Education for the state of education throughout the country, and the fact that the Minister does not control, or even influence, provincial allocations for education. I then observed that I am closing this gap, not with a constitutional amendment, but with a vigorous interpretation of the constitutional doctrine of co-operative government.
I have said the same on more than one occasion, starting with my Call to Action document in July last year, where I named co-operative government in education at the head of my list of nine priorities. It surprised me, therefore, that my remark in the National Assembly caused alarm in some quarters, as I if I were enunciating some radical new idea. Nevertheless, if an explanation would be helpful, I am happy to oblige-especially in this forum.
It is an unquestionable fact of our national life that the Minister of Education carries the political burden of responsibility for the welfare of the entire national system of education. It is an indisputable consequence of our constitutional arrangements that the Minister of Education controls no provincial education budgets and disposes of no executive power with respect to provincial education.
In brief, I have no lawful authority to order any provincial officer to do anything whatsoever. In the terminology of system analysis, the national and provincial levels of government are loosely coupled. An impulse from the national level does not necessarily translate into a corresponding action at the provincial level, still less at the level of the school or college or adult learning centre. So what is to be done?
Well, the gap must be filled. Politics and government alike abhor a vacuum.
It is not permissible for the Minister of Education to say, "I have no power over provincial education, so the provinces can go their own way." In fact, the Constitution prohibits such irresponsibility by creating a finely woven tapestry of interdependence among the different levels of government. The President and his Cabinet carry executive responsibility for every matter of national interest. The provincial governments are required to execute national legislation, policy and frameworks that advance the national interest. The national government is obliged to assist each provincial government.
To apply a "vigorous interpretation of co-operative government" means that I undertake:
The Council of Education Ministers, with an almost entirely new cast, has had the cobwebs shaken out of it, and is now functioning as an invaluable, lively, inter-active forum for political debate, mutual support, mutual correction and executive decision-making. The Heads of Education Departments Committee, under Director-General Thami Mseleku, is following suit.
Every MEC for Education, and I myself, have made numerous highly visible visits to schools, to monitor performance on the first day of term, to expose cases of notorious abuse and neglect, and to praise and encourage educators and learners who are succeeding even under conditions of serious adversity.
The MECs for Education and I are collectively determined to ensure that the management and staff of every school, college and learning centre in the country are held to the highest standards of professional delivery.
This is what the people of this country expect from their education system, and it is what they are entitled to. The organised teaching profession and the South African Council of Educators are indispensable allies in these endeavours.
My provincial colleagues are collaborating in an important monitoring exercise. With their help, in November last year I delivered my first report to the President on provincial education and, at the President's invitation, I made a presentation on this matter to the Premiers. I hope Honourable Members and Delegates will have seen the executive summary in my Department's 1999 Annual Report. The first provincial report covered several matters of topical concern at the turn of the millennium year:
This month, I have delivered my second report on provincial education to the President. This is a comprehensive document covering no less than seven themes:
I am grateful to the MECs and their departmental officials for putting serious effort into these reports. Monitoring is labour intensive.
It is only justified if it involves serious self-examination and professional feedback, and leads to improved performance. We are still at an early stage in the development of this process, and I am sure it can be improved. Having laid a solid foundation with the first two reports, I intend that subsequent reports should focus on fewer themes and be much more sharply evaluative. Mere facts, however voluminous, do not tell the story we need to hear. Nevertheless, we have made a start.
I have tried to convey to this Council that there is a serious engagement under way to help build the sinews of an effective provincial system of education. This effort is collaborative, it is driven by the political leadership, and it depends on co-operative work between the professionals of the national and professional departments of education. It is also supplemented, I may say, by the professional resources of a large number of academic and NGO agencies, whose work is financed both on budget and by the continued welcome support of our international and local funding partners.
All our work is aimed at the achievement of a system of education that fits our nation for the demands of the new century. The demands on our system are formidable. We are required to support and sustain education performance for increasing numbers at the highest national and international level. Simultaneously, we are required to make up learning deficits of staggering magnitudes in our child, youth and adult populations, and attend seriously to the special learning needs of the most vulnerable members of our communities.
Since July last year, when I published my Call to Action, I have insisted that we cannot do everything at once. It is essential to prioritise, and within priorities, to set targets. My nine priorities have been translated into an action programme for the period January 2000-December 2004 under the watchword Tirisano-working together. This phrase perfectly captures both the spirit of co-operative government and the need for a mobilisation of all the creative forces in society in support of our education project. Deputy President Jacob Zuma launched our Tirisano implementation plan in January this year, and the details were published in our 1999 Annual Report. Each province has since drawn up a plan for Tirisano that reflects its particular needs and style of operation.
Provincial action on education priorities is being undertaken within a budgetary context that is still exceptionally difficult. The total outlay on provincial education has reached R43 billion in this financial year, close to 40 per cent of total provincial budgets.
Provincial budget management has been a major project of the national and provincial departments of education, in collaboration with their counterparts in Finance. The painful process of correcting for the extremely high, largely unbudgeted, increases in education spending in 1996/97 is still an important factor in the budget process of most provinces. The dramatic increase in the baseline of education expenditure in that year was not sustainable. Consequently, there has been a real annual decline in total education expenditure from 1996/97 to 1999/2000.
Personnel costs represent by far the largest proportion of education spending, and the cost of educators (as distinct from public servants) is by far the largest factor in personnel spending. Thanks to the statesmanlike agreements reached in June 1998 between the Minister of Education and the three national teachers unions, the management of educator costs has been brought under strict control. The key factors in this process have been a nationally agreed system of norms to guide the allocation of teachers to schools, and a sophisticated process of rationalisation and redeployment that has been undertaken through collaboration between the national and provincial departments and the teachers unions.
In addition, provincial education departments, backed by their provincial governments and the criminal justice system, have taken serious steps to eliminate the inheritance of fraud and corruption that has swollen their payrolls with ghost teachers and officials. Thus, all provinces have made strenuous efforts to increase the efficiency of personnel spending and improve the balance between personnel and non-personnel expenditure.
Nevertheless, in most provinces-and particularly in the largest, poorest and most rural provinces-personnel spending continues to crowd out non-personnel spending to an unacceptable degree. These provinces inherited inefficient school systems with high failure rates and large numbers of repeaters, major backlogs of school buildings and services (especially water and sanitation, but also electricity and telephones), and inadequate teaching and learning resources, libraries and equipment. Provincial education departments whose governments were placed under section 100 conditions by the Ministry of Finance have had to accept close central control by provincial treasuries and contribute toward the elimination of provincial overdrafts.
Under such conditions, it must again be acknowledged that the education budgets of the poorest and most rural provinces are not yet educationally credible. What do I mean by this? The phrase was introduced by the 1998 MTEF Education Sector Review Team. What it means is that, even under optimal management conditions (which we know do not apply) the budgeted allocations to most provincial education departments are wholly inadequate to provide for the essential education services for which they are responsible.
Chairperson, this is not news. It is all too common knowledge. I want to make two comments on this situation.
Firstly, the efforts to improve the quality of education spending must continue unabated. This is essential to ensure that waste and inefficiency is reduced, and funds are directed properly to where the needs are greatest. This involves capacity building and improving management systems in provincial departments through the professional partnership, including technical support, between the national and provincial education departments on the one hand, and the education and finance departments on the other. A large part of the conditional grant of R272 million this year will continue to support this joint work, together with the invaluable support of external agencies. Working to ensure the proper implementation of the school funding norms and standards, and the age-grade norms and assessment policy in schools, will contribute significantly to improving internal efficiency in the system.
Secondly, I am all too aware that our Constitution places an unmistakable duty upon the state-upon this government-to protect and fulfil the right of everyone to basic education, including adult basic education.
The language of the Constitution is unambiguous. This right is not qualified by considerations of progressive availability of resources or other reasonable impediments. Among the many challenges the government faces in delivering education of high quality to all our citizens, this must surely be rated the most grave.
I am attempting to address this matter on a number of fronts:
These steps are important and necessary. But we cannot allow ourselves to believe that they are sufficient, not unless and until we are able to generate provincial education budgets that are educationally credible, that enable us to offer every learner in democratic South Africa access to basic education of satisfactory quality.
Chairperson, I want to refer to momentous changes that are occurring in the provision of teacher education. The Council is aware that teacher education is a component of higher education, and that higher education is an exclusive national competence.
The future of teachers colleges, which are still under provincial control, has been subject to a protracted process of investigation and planning.
In 1994, approximately 150 institutions provided teacher education to about 200,000 students, of whom about 80,000 were enrolled in colleges of education.
Many teachers colleges had been established by homeland and so-called independent states without consideration of cost, need or quality. Many were no more than vocational high schools by another name. The per student cost in teachers colleges well exceeded the per student cost in universities. The situation was intolerable.
In 1996, the Council of Education Ministers decided to embark on a programme of rationalisation, as a precursor to the incorporation of the remaining viable colleges into higher education.
By this year, the number of teachers colleges had been reduced to 50, with 20 000 students, out of a total of 82 public institutions offering teacher education to 115,000 students. Of these, about 20,000 are enrolled in pre-service programmes and 95,000 in in-service programmes.
Once the provincial rationalisation process is completed, 25 earmarked contact colleges of education will have about 15,000 students, and two distance education colleges will enrol another 5,000, measured as full-time equivalents.
In the course of the planning process, it has become clear that no public college of education can survive as an independent institution within the higher education sector. Thus all surviving colleges will be incorporated into universities and technikons respectively. I have already announced the first wave of incorporations of colleges of education into universities and technikons. I intend to announce the second wave of incorporations as soon as agreements with the parties are complete.
Meanwhile, a Department of Education steering committee, assisted by an external agency, will complete the planning tasks required in order for decisions to be taken on funding, staff, students and programmes. I expect a report before the end of August.
In the last quarter of the year, we will have a national conference on teacher education. The Department of Education will present a vision for teacher education in the radically changed circumstances in which we find ourselves. These circumstances include a major decline in enrolments in public teacher education institutions, a major expansion of public-private partnerships in teacher education, serious teacher shortages in strategic subjects, and the severe impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on teachers, the demand for teachers, and the role that teachers need to play in schools and the community. I intend that this conference will be the launch pad for a major revision in popular attitudes towards teaching as a profession, an occasion that will introduce the country to a new and compelling vision for teacher education and teacher development.
Chairperson, in our Tirisano programme we have nominated HIV/AIDS as our number one priority. We are acutely aware of our responsibility to ensure that our sector does everything in its capacity to contribute to the reduction of HIV infections through timely and appropriate education. We have three projects.
The first is to improve awareness, information and advocacy.
The second is to ensure that life skills and HIV/AIDS education are integrated into the curriculum at all levels of the system.
The third is to develop planning models for understanding the impact of the HIV/AIDS on the education and training system.
The outcome of these studies will be to ensure that we respond adequately to the impact of the epidemic on the sustainability of the education and training system, and act to establish care and support systems for learners and educators who are affected by HIV/AIDS.
We are working closely with the Departments of Health, Welfare and Finance to ensure that the government's special allocation for an integrated HIV/AIDS strategy is effectively used. A large proportion of this year's allocation of R75 million will be channelled into support for the education campaign in and out of schools.
The integrated strategy against HIV/AIDS is so important for the future of our nation that this Council might consider conducting a special debate on the topic. I hope, Chairperson, that you and the Whips will agree.
I thank you.