Marion Edmunds
THE government is to investigate importing Cuban teachers to shore up the state school service. Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu said this week he planned to go to Cuba later this month to look at the country’s maths and science teachers.
He dismissed suggestions that the government’s redeployment programme – where state teachers were offered new posts or retrenchment packages in a drive to equalise resources – had robbed the service of its best staff.
The Cuban initiative instead was targeting South Africa’s expected teaching needs over the next eight years, Bengu claimed.
“Cuba would qualify in the areas of education because they produced mass teachers and mass scientists,” he told the Mail & Guardian.
“That they succeeded in doing – so they do have surpluses, so that is a factor we would want to look at.”
The plan follows a similar initiative by Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma, who has drafted in hundreds of Cuban doctors to fill gaps in poorer provinces’ health services.
Teaching unions have warned that the redeployment programme, initiated last year, has led merely to thousands of the most senior, experienced teachers leaving the profession. Bengu conceded last month that the programme had weak points. But he countered the statement this week that there was no scientific proof that expertise had been lost.
Bengu also announced this week that he had secured R4,88-billion in government subsidies for tertiary education for the new financial year – higher than the figure originally agreed with the finance ministry.
The previous budget would have forced cuts in subsidies to tertiary education – a threat which prompted recent widespread campus protests.
He said that subsidies for universities would stay the same as last year, except for the five homeland universities whose subsidies would be reduced slightly to the bring them into the line with the other tertiary institutions.