The provinces have an impossible choice: retrench teachers or go over budget, writes Andy Duffy
Provincial education departments are urging the national government to consider lifting the ban on the forced retrenchment of teachers.
The provinces say attempts to cut personnel costs through voluntary retrenchment and redeployment have failed, leaving them little choice but to axe teaching staff to stay within their budgets.
Most provinces have suffered cuts in their education budgets. KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape have both in recent weeks raised the issue with the national education department. Minister of Education Sibusiso Bengu’s office says the ministry has also received requests from other provinces, including Gauteng and the Northern Cape.
A forced-retrenchment policy would be politically dangerous for Bengu. It would put him on a collision course with teaching unions and with President Nelson Mandela, who has promised there will be no forced job losses among teachers.
Ministerial adviser Thami Mseleku says Bengu does not believe forced retrenchment is the only option. But some national education officials privately feel that forced job cuts are inevitable.
The national department has passed the provinces’ request to Cabinet for approval in principle. The Ministry of Finance is also looking at the likely cost of severance packages.
The Education Labour Relations Council, which includes teaching-union representatives, would be called on to work out the details of any retrenchment programme.
“The department doesn’t have a formal view,” says one official, “but we realise it [forced retrenchments] has to be addressed. We don’t see there’s another way.”
KwaZulu-Natal education department deputy director, Mike Jarvis, says his department expects to spend R800-million more than its R6,1-billion budget – most of it on salaries for its 82 000 teachers.
He says the province urgently needs “clarity” from national government on a forced-retrenchment policy – an issue, he says, that should have been cleared up last year.
A representative for the Western Cape education department says: “We need a mechanism to cut our personnel expenses. We need a mechanism to reduce the number of educators. It will be very difficult to deliver all the services [such as the new curriculum] without these cuts. “
The province, which employs 32 770 teachers, has already been forced to scrap thousands of teaching posts as part of Bengu’s attempts to redress past imbalances in teaching resources between schools and provinces.
Should provinces get the go-ahead to swing the axe, the significance would spread far beyond education. There is a moratorium on forced job losses across the public service, though the government wants to revisit the issue.
Bengu has tried to cut teaching numbers by offering voluntary severance packages. He also wanted to avoid forced job cuts by redeploying excess teachers to under- resourced schools and provinces. Both strategies were drawn up after lengthy talks to secure the support of teaching unions, and have largely failed.
Mseleku says one option could be to refine the voluntary severance programme to target individuals. Those targeted would be given the opportunity to accept severance or redeployment, or take up a post vacated when another staff member retires. Teachers who refuse these choices would be in breach of their public service contract, and, in effect, resigning.
The unions, particularly the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), are likely to give government a hard time over retrenchments.
Bengu’s handling of the Grove Primary School issue has lifted Sadtu’s confidence in its ability to sway education policy.
The Cape Town school, supported by 80 others, mounted a successful court challenge to Bengu’s demand that state schools recruit from a central list of teachers available for redeployment. The ruling effectively crippled the minister’s redeployment strategy, and he is to appeal next month. He is also pushing legislative amendments to circumvent the ruling.
Sadtu is widely credited with influencing Bengu’s approach. The union did little this week to contradict that analysis, conceding that it had lobbied strongly.