This year’s national education budget has prompted concerns that the most vulnerable of South Africa’s children could once again disappear from the country’s priorities.
The future of early childhood development (ECD) is one focus of a recent independent analysis of the 2003 national education budget.
Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) researcher Russell Wildeman draws attention to the phasing-out of the ECD grant this year. The scale of ECD’s focus is vast. ”Approximately 40% of young children in South Africa grow up in conditions of abject poverty and neglect,” says the Department of Education’s 2001 White Paper on ECD.
”Children raised in such poor families are most at risk of infant death, low birth-weight, stunted growth, poor adjustment to school, increased repetition and school dropout.”
The White Paper proposed a national system of provision centred on a Reception Year (grade R) for children aged five, based largely in public primary schools but with a small community-based component.
The Treasury then made special ECD funding available in the form of conditional grants — that is, funding that provinces could not absorb into their education budgets for use as they pleased but had to earmark for ECD only.
But the ECD grant will be phased out in 2003/04, Wildeman notes. This means that provinces will become the main providers of ECD services via normal budgetary means — although the education department ”feels that a one-year extension on the grant would assist provinces that are not yet ready to take full responsibility for the programme”.
There is no guarantee the one-year extension will be granted, but the department’s interest in an extension reflects ”concerns about the sustainability of ECD provisioning post-2003/04”, Wildeman writes.
The department has not had a response yet to its request for an extension, education Deputy Director General Duncan Hindle told the Mail & Guardian this week.
”But the fact that this is being considered does reflect a concern that provincial education budgets may not be sufficient to fully implement the rollout of grade R in accordance with the White Paper’s projections.”
Wildeman also notes the impact that the department’s recent review of funding for schools could have: ”The planned national targeting of poor learners could absorb much of the small real increases in provincial education budgets, thus leaving discretionary ECD spending vulnerable in many provinces.”
But the targeting of poor learners should not ”pose a threat to any programme”, Hindle says.
”The funds for public ordinary schooling (excluding ECD) will be allocated to the poorest schools and students based on the funding norms, but this should not erode the resources of any other programme.”
The underlying logic in phasing out the ECD grant is that by now provinces should have incorporated this spending into their budgets, Wildeman told the M&G last week. ”But I seriously doubt it. And some provinces will be more affected than others — the traditionally poorer ones such as the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga, for example.”
Hindle says the provinces have been aware from the inception of the ECD programme that they would be responsible for its sustained funding.
”Many provinces have provided for this — not under an ECD line item, but in the budget for public ordinary schools, where many of the grade R classes are or will be located. Idasa is wrong to look for a separate budget line for ECD in this case.”