Marion Edmunds
THE cash-strapped Western Cape Education Department is depositing millions of rands into the bank accounts of adult literacy centres for spending on education materials – but largely ignores their administrative and teaching needs.
With confusion rife, concern is mounting among literacy centres and providers of education materials: they worry that the system set up by the Western Cape adult education sub-directorate to distribute state and foreign funds for literacy programmes is designed to promote the interests of publishing companies, rather than of learners.
A departmental representative said R14,6- million is budgeted for adult-based education this year, drawing R5,4-million from the national foreign-funded Ithuteng project, R1,17-million from national allocations and the rest from provincial funds.
The amount allocated to learning materials leads to skewed expenditure.
For example, chair of the Karoo’s Klawervlei Literacy Project Stefanus Jooste told the Mail & Guardian his centre had received R21 000 for learning materials and R3 000 for administration, travelling costs and salaries.
“We don’t know what to do and it’s a real problem, because we are 55km away from the nearest farm. In the beginning, they said we could have money and decide ourselves what to do with it, but when the contract came, they specified that most had to be spent on learning materials.”
Jooste said that they were obliged to buy materials from the only provider that visited them and they were now desperately looking for funds to train teachers and keep the centre going in order to use their costly materials.
The ease with which centres can get money for materials is frightening. All they have to do is submit a claim detailing the number of learners they have on their books and the number of subjects they are studying.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) told the M&G that they are then paid R200 per learner per subject, with the proviso that the money only be used to buy materials, and be spent within 30 days. The department said it pays R400 per learner per subject.
At this point the booksellers descend on the NGOs to push their wares. Many of the smaller centres do not have sufficiently well-trained or skilled facilitators to select appropriate materials for the programmes. Nor have they the skills to assess the competence of their learners so that they can decide which level of books they need.
The department claims that some centres have up to 3 000 learners although the largest centre identified by the M&G in the Western Cape, the National Literacy Co- operation, claims to have only 500 learners on its books.
The Department of Education has been reluctant to comment on the scheme for the past three weeks, and the senior directors of adult education – the only people permitted to answer questions – have been inaccessible. This is a frequent complaint by the literacy centres, which have been battling to find out about teacher-training so that their educators can learn how to use the costly materials they have already bought.
Most of those contacted did not want to speak on the record about the shortcomings of the department as they feared it would jeopardise their chances of getting more money.
It appears that problems are not limited to the Western Cape. In KwaZulu-Natal, the Education Department has been veering off in a different direction, spending a disproportionately large amount on teacher- training for adult educators and ignoring the purchasing of materials.
“The differences between the provinces in approach are pretty startling … and getting the balance right between materials and training is clearly tricky. I think, however, it will be very difficult to monitor how the money is spent in the Western Cape, given the system they are using,” said Elda Lyster, co-ordinator of the department of adult community education at the University of Durban-Natal.