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Madam Speaker

Introduction

Putting our education system right, and re-positioning it for the next century, is a formidable task, and not one for the faint-hearted.

Fortunately, the education profession has always attracted more than its share of strong and self-sacrificing men and women, who are determined to do their utmost for their learners even in circumstances of uncertainty or discouragement. I salute them and thank them.

Madam Speaker, the 1997 Annual Report of the Department of Education has been tabled. It is an excellent record of a transforming department at work in the national interest.

Not only that, I am delighted to say that the Auditor-General has commended the Department on its record of responsible financial management.

The Director-General, Dr Chabani Manganyi, is out of the country on official business, but in his absence I want to record my thanks to him and all his team.

Dr Blade Nzimande and the entire ANC Education Study Group have given constant support and advice which I deeply appreciate. I also extend thanks to all members of the Portfolio Committee on Education, which Dr Nzimande leads, for their important contributions to our education policies and laws.

Vote 12: Education

This year, the Education vote has been allocated almost R6,5 billion. In 1998/99, which is a normal increase of 16,9 per cent over last year's allocation. I invite the House to support this allocation wholeheartedly.

In case any Honourable Member is still unsure of the position, I must emphasise that I am not responsible for the allocations made by provincial governments to provincial education departments. This vote does not include such allocations.

* R6 million of the R6,5 billion on vote 12 represents transfer payments to universities and technikons and the National Student Financial Aid Scheme.

* An Education Policy Reserve of R200 million is a new allocation in the MTEF for management development and quality improvement in provincial education.

* R53 million are transfer payments to provincial departments to continue their youth / community college programmes.

* R51 million has been allocated as conditional grants to Northern and KwaZulu-Natal Provinces to complete their part of the RDP National School Building Programme.

* The Department of Education has been allocated R108 million for its own operations, which is R19 million less than last year. In some areas the shoe will pinch, but we are determined that no essential work will be compromised. We are extremely grateful to the international and South African donors who will be assisting the Department this year, in the spirit of partnership, to push forward with our important work.

* An allocation of R80 million was included on my vote under the name of the "KwaZulu-Natal Peace Initiative". This is not a project of my Ministry, and Treasury has now informed us that the allocation is not for Education but for the KwaZulu-Natal Government. It should be suspended from my vote and other arrangements made. The uncertainty surrounding this matter is regrettable.

It is fitting to express my satisfaction with the manner in which the nation's responsibility to put the education system right has been wholeheartedly supported by the President, Executive Deputy President, and Government as a whole, and my appreciation to Comrades Trevor Manuel and Gill Marcus and their teams for the excellent co-operation we have enjoyed in the past year.

Our achievements

Madam Speaker, four years ago this Government was elected with a mandate to transform a rotten system of education.

Four years ago, education in this country was run by a nightmare collection of nineteen separate racial and ethnic departments operating in so-called independent states, homelands, and the abominable tri-cameral system. The Department of Education and Training administered education for Africans "white "RSA. Presiding over all was a white Broederbond bastion known as the Department of National Education, which dreamed up policies and divided up the money.

We promised to do away with all that, and we have done so. Under our democratic Constitution, we have created a single, non-racial, non-sexist, national system of education, with nine provincial sub-systems as spelled out in the 1995 White Paper, Education Policy for a Democratic South Africa: First Steps to Develop a New System, and confirmed in the National Education Policy Act, 1996. The organs of co-operative government in education are alive and well. The national Department of Education is a new, capable, increasingly representative structure, which conducts its business openly and consultatively under our own laws.

Four years ago, the education set-up was founded on a denial of equality between human beings in their own country, on a history of outright white supremacy, "separate development", "separate freedoms", "plural affairs", "community development", and all other lies and abominations on which minority rule in this country was based. Generations of young South Africans had been forced to imbibe and regurgitate the doctrines of Christian National Education, Bantu Education or Fundamental Pedagogics.

We promised to do away with all that, and we have done so. The ideologies of racial and religious fantasy have been replaced with the humane Constitutional values of equality and non-discrimination, equal respect and equal dignity. Discrimination in admissions policy is outlawed. Corporal punishment is outlawed. Our educational values, backed by initiatives like the National Qualifications Framework and Curriculum 2005, recognise no barrier to personal development in a free society.

Four years ago, governance in education was based on illegitimate power relations, which was a major cause of resistance and turmoil in the Black communities. PTSAs could only be developed in defiance of the law. SRCs were banned by the apartheid security machine.

We promised to do away with all that, and we have done so. The South African Schools Act, 1996, which was resisted and contested at every step by the structures of white privilege, has created a national, non-racial system of public schools based on partnership between the provincial governments and the school communities, and representative school governing bodies led by the parents. Elected Learner Representative Councils are mandatory in every secondary school.

The Higher Education Act, 1997 has ushered in a similar pattern of responsible, representative governance within a united non-racial system based on partnership.

I will soon announce the membership of the new Council on Higher Education, but I am happy to tell the House today that Professor Wiseman Nkuhlu has agreed to be the Chairperson.

We promised to establish a National Qualifications Framework, a new schools curriculum framework, develop new policies for further Education and Training, Adult Basic Education and Training, Early Childhood Development, Special Needs Education, Teacher Education, Language in Education, Gender Equity, Leaner Assessment, Educator Appraisal, Distance Education, and Mathematics, Science and Technology Education. We have either done so or it is being done.

We promised to create a new national Educational Management Information System, to understand where we are and develop indicators of where we need to be, and we have done so, as well as establishing a national School Register of Needs to guide our investment in essential infrastructure.

The challenges we have taken up.

Madam Speaker, this is a snapshot of only some of our achievements in four years of democratic government. The education environment has been transformed, and the credit belongs to all who worked so hard to make it happen, including members of this Parliament.

But in many areas we are still at the foundation age, progress is agonisingly slow, shocking inequalities still exist, performance is miserably bad, budgets are stretched thin, management is struggling, and people are loafing. The present challenges of implementation and consolidation are just as great as anything we have faced before.

As the MTEF documents indicate, the education sector receive a major share of the national budget. I will continue to press the case for education funding, especially where there are imbalances in provision for poor provinces.

The government has indeed put education first among its spending priorities, but Cabinet accepts that education spending cannot rise much further as a proportion of total budget spending, and that the education budget must get a much better return.

My message to the country is that managers must manage the vast sums this nations spends on education far, far better than we are doing at present.

In other words, the fundamental challenge in the management of our national education system is not per se to find additional money-however welcome that would be-but how to allocate funds more equitably, cut waste, improve work rate, and target spending where it will make a real difference to education quality.

We have been saying this ever since we came into government. Now, more than ever, it is essential for all provincial education departments and education institutions to act on it. Some are doing so, and I congratulate them.

In our 1998/99 Action Programme, we have identified five inter-related spheres of management action, and we are working seriously on all five.

(1) Re-orienting education spending

Firstly, we are committed to ensuring that education spending serves our prime policy goals: redress, equity and quality. These belong together. The horrible inequality in education provision we have inherited is not only unjust. It translate into shocking waste, both of material resources and of precious human talent.

Compared with where we started in 1994, we have made huge progress in re-organising education spending in line with our Constitution. But our School Register of Needs survey is an index of how far there is to go.

At national level, we will register several notable gains in 1998:

* The new national norms and standards for school funding, on which we are having final consultations, will tackle unequal funding head-on, and give provincial governments the necessary guidance to distribute their scarce resources in the most equitable, affirmative and effective way we can devise.

* The Policy Reserve fund in this year's budget allocates R200 million for quality improvement and better management projects in provincial departments.

* Our White Paper and Bill on Further Education and Training will create a new basis for planning, governing and funding public technical and community colleges, to equip them to contribute to the modernisation of our economy, and empower young people and adults for employment and self-employment.

* Our multi-year investment plan for Adult Basic Education and Training has already been launched. Bit by bit we are positioning the adult education system to move out of the Constitutional right to basic education.

* In both EBET and Further Education and Training, we will work closely with the new funding o governance structures for skills development envisaged in Comrade Tito Mboweni's Skills Development Bill.

* Finally, in higher education, the average funding level for universities and technikons has been stabilised over the MTEF period. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has been allocated significant additional resources. A redress fund has been opened this year to target specific deficits in the historically disadvantaged institutions, in areas like information technology. And major documents will soon be issued, on the new planning and funding framework for higher education, and the permanent structure of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. These moves all flow from the Higher Education White Paper and Act.

(2) Responsible management of personnel provision

The second vital management action we have taken is to provide leadership for the responsible management of personnel provision in education.

* Personnel costs comprise 90 per cent o provincial education budgets. We are working to help provinces to reduce this figure to 80 per cent, by a variety of measures and over a period of years.

* Our new policy of post provisioning, which has been approved by the Council of Education Ministers, and is currently in the ELRC process, will enable provinces to budget realistically, equitably and on sound educational grounds for their educator personnel.

* We are assisting provinces to develop a multi -prolonged strategy to achieve long-term stability in personnel provision and budgeting, over a period of years, in a planned and responsible manner. A prerequisite of success is that they must have accurate data about learners and educators, and exercise proper control over recruitment.

(3) Reducing inefficiencies and raising productivity

The third management action we are taking, is to target waste and inefficiency in the delivery of education services and increase productivity. Here too, we are working with provinces on four critical management decisions which could save the system billions of rands over time, and deliver dramatic learning gains.

* The age admission to Grade 1 will be controlled, to avoid premature enrolment, unnecessary failure and grade repetition in the early years.

* An educationally acceptable policy to prevent undue repetition of grades will be introduced to curb abuse (especially at Grade 12) and ensure that young exit the school system at an appropriate age.

* New job description for educators will empower provincial authorities to punish abuses like absenteeism, irregular job-sharing and undisciplined behaviour which are an insult to parents, learners and the educator profession.

* A HEDCOM Task Team on Educational Materials has been set up to achieve for textbook and stationery delivery what a similar task team has done for the efficient administration of the senior certificate examinations.

(4) Improving the quality of teaching and learning

* We are undertaking a quality assurance this year, preparatory to a total re-design of all quality assurance and support mechanism at national, provincial and school levels.

* The phased introduction of Curriculum 2005 is proceeding in a responsible manner. New learning programmes, and teacher development, are also in place in ECD, EBET and Teacher Education, and the stage is set for an overhaul of Further and Higher Education qualifications and curricula, guided by the new Council on Higher Education and National Board on Further Education and Training.

* The Culture of Learning, Teaching and Service campaign is continuing its vital work this year, under the able leadership of Deputy Minister Mkhatshwa.

Madam Speaker, earlier I paid a heartfelt tribute to the hardworking professional educators in the system.

My sentiments towards them are quite separate from the ongoing differences between my Ministry and the teachers' organisations. These differences are at present quite serious, but I will not debate them here. We have tried and we will continue to seek ways to achieve a platform of mutual confidence and collaboration between ourselves and the organised educators. We need to work together rather than against one another.

However, in relation to improving the quality of teaching and learning, I want to make a clear statement about protest action by educators and others. Protest action that does not disrupt schooling is on thing. But protest action that takes teachers out of their schools and away from their learners is quite another thing. I strongly condemn it, and I am quite certain that such action is not supported by the vast majority of learners or their parents, whose tolerance for disruptions of schooling for whatever reason is at zero level.

Incidentally, the same applies to disruptive protest of any kind in higher education institutions.

The provincial MEC for Education and myself are determined to lead the rebuilding of the education system on the basis of true professionalism. We are also determined to defend learners' rights to be properly taught and to learn to really - learn in their schools. These goals are easily obscured by adversarial relations between the organised teaching profession and the employers.

(5) Improving education management

The fifth vital area of management action is in management development itself. Good management guarantees the elimination of waste, corruption and failure in education. This is the pivotal area of action, and we are putting great energy into it this year.

* At long last, the national Education Management Development Institute will be established, as a resource base for the whole system.

* The Provincial Support Unit, which has begun operations, will enable the Department to bring concentrated expertise to bear on specific system needs at the request of provincial departments.

* A major new District Development Project will be launched in 30 poor-performing districts across the country with Education Policy Reserve and donor funds.

The same funding source will enable us to develop and distribute management manuals and other resource materials to build capacity among school governing bodies and district school leadership teams.

MINEDAF VII

Madam Speaker, two weeks ago I had the honour to preside at the 7th Conference for Ministers of Education in Africa, known as MINEDAF VII, which was jointly convened by UNESCO and my Ministry.

Extraordinary interest and admiration was expressed for our education policies. This was gratifying, but we are under no illusions. We were at pains to explain that the educational needs in this country are vast, and that we have serious problems in meeting them.

Madam Speaker, we must be good citizens in Africa. This sometimes means taking a leadership role if we are asked to do so, within regional structures. It also means being ready to return some of the generous hospitality which was extended by African States and higher education institutions to hundreds of South Africans during the liberation struggle.

South Africa was asked by the African Ministers to guide the implementation of the Programme they adopted at the end of the Conference. We agreed. As part of a general audit and mobilisation of continent-wide capacity, supported by international development agencies, I offered the use of our infrastructure in higher education for human resource development and capacity building on the continent. Our offer was accepted. While we will be giving, we will also be receiving, since the project is conceived in the spirit of mutual benefit.

The details will be worked out within the regional structures, in terms of South African law and in full consultation with the South African higher education community and our African and international partners. I am sure the House will give us its full support.

Conclusion

Madam Speaker, the Ministry of Education means business. We are proud of our record. We know where the problems are. We are taking decisive steps to deal with them, in partnership with our provincial colleagues, the education NGOs and academic community, an increasing number of corporate partners, the international development agencies, and the community educators.

In return for its huge investment, and to honour our collective struggle for educational rights, our country needs and expects harmony, purpose and discipline in our education system. Together, we must and will deliver.

I thank you.

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