[ Home ] [ Speeches & statements ]

This is the last Education budget speech of this term of government. It is appropriate that this budget should be focused primarily on quality: on improving conditions for teaching and learning. In the last five years we have laid the groundwork in terms of systems and policy and in this year we expect to see this bearing fruit in substantial gains towards quality improvement. This budget is a major step towards that goal.

I wish to take this opportunity to express my thanks to all the members of the Gauteng Department of Education for the remarkable contribution they have made, through their unstinting commitment, to the transformation of education in the province. This government will leave a legacy of an established single and non-racial education department. It will also leave a legacy of a substantial body of policy, within a national framework, that will lay the basis for all the transformative work that will increasingly deepen quality in education in the years to come.

The education budget for Gauteng in the year 1999/2000 of R6,23bn reflects a significant increase of 2,83% (or R171 656 000) relative to the last financial year. I wish to thank our Premier, Mathole Motshekga, and my colleagues in the Executive Council for the way in which they have supported, often at the expense of their own departments, the need to invest in education in Gauteng. I wish to thank the MEC for Finance and Economic Affairs, Jabu Moleketi, for his understanding and his support.

This year's budget is thus a considerable increase on previous years, which have been characterised by extreme financial austerity for the department. In previous years we have had to table a highly constrained budget and development work has had to be initiated on the basis of very careful reprioritisation and creative use of existing resources.

Despite these serious constraints, we have over the last five years achieved the Herculean task of establishing a single non-racial department with entirely new administrative systems and procedures, whilst at the same time we are continually improving our administrative systems in order to be efficient and effective. Examples of such improvements include examination management, financial management and personnel management.

Only those who have no understanding of the devastation of apartheid education underestimate the extent of the stability we have achieved in our schools. Schools are getting better. There are many that still have considerable problems, and we are dealing with these, but the tide is turning. I am confident that steady progress will continue to make all schools effective sites of teaching and learning.

The desegregation of schools which previously excluded children on the basis of race has been a major step forward. By 1997, a total of 164 00 (or 12% of the total) children were admitted to schools from which they would have previously been excluded. However, despite this progress we have still a long way to go to achieve our goal of a society and education system not distorted by the racial structure of privilege and poverty. Sixty-one percent of our learners in the province still learn and live in environments where there is no racial integration. And all of these are African.

Areas where we have a proud record of effecting change despite immense resource constraints include:

* When the schools currently under construction are complete, we will have built over 100 new schools. Including all the classrooms that are currently completed, planned (funded) or under construction, we will have built 3 898 classrooms. We have built over 100 additional new administration blocks, and over 300 toilet blocks. An additional 340 toilet blocks are either planned or are under construction. As many as 189 schools have been electrified.
* We have nearly completed the complex personnel management process of achieving equity in the deployment of our most valuable asset - our teachers. This will bring much greater stability to our staffrooms, and greatly improve teacher morale.
* We have nearly completed the process of achieving an equitable distribution on non-teaching personnel across our schools with their different patterns of historical privilege.
* We have expanded access to education generally, and specifically have introduced a scholar-transport scheme to assist children living in rural areas, and children with barriers to learning, who would otherwise have to walk great distances to school.
* We have implemented Curriculum 2005 in Grade 1 in 1998, and in Grade2 in 1999. We have established the GICD which is taking the lead in preparing our schools for curriculum development.

This budget will, for the 1999/2000 year, give a major impetus for improvements in our schools. When I express excitement about the quality interventions we will make in our schools, in terms of creating the necessary conditions for effective teaching and learning, my excitement is based on the following:

* We have been able to budget R107m for learning materials - this is more than we were able to budget for the three financial years 1995/6 (R31.3m), 1996/7 (R49.5m) and 1997/8 (R21.3m) all together. It is also nearly three times more than we were able to budget for in the 1998/9 year. We hope to not only lay the basis for the ongoing implementation of Curriculum 2005, but also address the backlogs in provision of textbooks where schools have effective plans to retain these texts in the schools.

* We have been able to nearly triple our budget for school furniture to R6.6m.

* We have been able to budget for more than 12 times more than last year for teaching materials and equipment and more than R23m will be available during the course of this year.

* Our budget for reading materials and libraries has increased 67 times to a budget allocation this year of R15.5m.

We have also increased our budgets for scholar transport, IT systems development and maintenance, and for ABET materials.

Massive resources are being injected into Human Resource Development. We are spending three and a half times more than we did last year and the development of the human resources we have in the department - both our teaching force and the personnel we have in offices - as well as ongoing school management development and training of school governors.

We have allocated R5m to upgrade the security fixtures in high priority schools.

These relatively small investments will bring high returns in the significant impact they will have on quality in schools. They represent an economist's dream - high returns for small investment. This investment will, I believe, be multiplied by the greater involvement of schooling communities in resource management that is envisaged in the South African Schools Act and will be implemented during this year. Increasingly, school communities will assume responsibility with regard to decision-making for resources allocated to the schools.

Whilst we are confident that we can give a good account of how we have acquitted our responsibilities over the last 5 years, we know that there is a great deal more to be done. Tasks we intend to take forward in the next five years include:

* Continuing to catch up the backlog in school building and renovating through a comprehensive school building programme for which the planning is in place through the medium term expenditure framework.
* Transformation of our Technical Colleges based on comprehensive study of these institutions, and its recommendations which will make our FET institutions more responsive to the needs of our communities and the realities of economic and social development.
* Creating the legal and institutional mechanisms for an integrated early childhood educare model.
* Increasing access to special education, and removing as many barriers as possible to learning in an inclusive environment
* Intensifying work on literacy for all, and access to education and training opportunities for young people and adults
* Increasing the quality of teaching and learning in all of our schools by intensive investment in school management and teacher development
* Continuing to transform our schools so that at both educator and learner levels they become increasingly reflective of the South African population. Our children deserve no less.

The review of progress made over the last five years, the plans we have for this year, and our vision for the ongoing transformation of education in the Gauteng Province are cause for us to celebrate. Things are changing in our schools - and we will achieve the quality for which South Africans have yearned for so many years.

Mary Metcalfe
MEC for Education, Gauteng Province

<EOD>