Education’s financial crisis is having a devastating impact on South Africa’s publishers of textbooks, writes Swapna Prabhakaran
South African educational publishers face lean times as the Department of Education shifts gears, changing its approach to implementation of the new outcomes-based Curriculum 2005.
While the new curriculum does require new textbooks, the department has sidestepped its promise to publishers to implement two grades – Grades 1 and 7 – in 1998. Instead, it only launched Grade 1, leaving textbook publishers who had prepared material for new Grade 7 textbooks in the lurch.
Provincial education budgets have been channelled into salaries, leaving very little for textbooks. This has led to a massive drop in textbook orders. In the face of this, large- scale retrenchments are taking place in the textbook-publishing industry, as publishers try to adjust to a potentially bleak future.
Lindelwe Mabandla, chairperson of the Education Publishers Group, feels the crisis could worsen. “What worries us a great deal is the impact of the huge drop in [textbook] orders. It has recently dropped by around 60%,” says Mabandla. In actual terms that means a drop from 850-million textbooks in the 1995/96 year to about 300-million textbooks this year.
“It is the students in the end who suffer,” Mabandla points out. But it’s the publishing industry that is feeling the pinch first. Where publishers have already spent huge amounts on researching and preparing materials for the new curriculum, cutbacks are now taking place.
At Kagiso Publishers, where Mabandla is managing director, the services of 56 employees were terminated. At Maskew Miller Longman (MML), 25 employees out of a staff of about 320 were retrenched. Other retrenchments throughout the industry look likely. Mabandla estimates that the rate of retrenchment could reach as much as 40% within educational publishing. “Of course it varies from company to company, but it could affect everyone, from specialised staff like marketing to editorial and illustrators,” Mabandla says.
MML chief executive Fathima Dada echoes his pessimistic sentiments: “If more money isn’t spent on textbooks soon, we might have to retrench more people in future,” she says.
Publishers met with the Department of Education last week to air their grievances and their fears. Rumour had been doing the rounds that the department was contemplating publishing its own educational resources, making the already established industry redundant. This rumour, at least, was laid to rest. The department’s director general apparently said during the meeting: “Our business is education, and not publishing.”
Yet Dada does not find this altogether reassuring. “We were told by the department that there will definitely be no state-produced materials, in principle, but it still concerns us that they might consider that if it is a cheaper option,” she said.
There is also a problem with the smooth delivery of textbooks and educational resource materials to schools. Some books never reach their intended destinations.
In the interests of preventing such glitches, a unit was recently set up within the Department of Education to monitor the supply process of textbooks to the provinces and to the schools. One of the members of the unit, Chris Madiba, said the unit was set up as a “hands-on task team” to iron out discrepancies. “We investigate this, and address the problems. Our main aim is to ensure that the learners get their books.”
The Department of Education was unable to comment by the time of going to press.