Although the Budget provides for an increase of 5% in further education and training (FET) spending per province, independent researchers believe that the money remains inadequate to deal with the challenges facing the sector.
FET covers both technical colleges and school education from grade 10 to grade 12.
Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel highlighted two national spending priorities — “increased support for curriculum development and implementation … particularly in the FET sector”, and higher education restructuring, which receives a further R1-billion.
But the details of the education vote suggest that most of the increased FET support will benefit schools, not colleges.
The FET college system underwent rationalisation in 2002 with 152 former technical colleges amalgamated into 50 FET colleges.
Their main challenge is to provide market-related programmes in line with government commitment to produce more technically skilled graduates.
Education once again received the biggest slice of Manuel’s Budget, consuming 23%. Education expenditure will increase from R69-billion to R75-billion in the 2004/05 financial year.
Russell Wildeman, education financing researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, said FET needs more funds. “Various technical institutions have been merged and among those are many which had little infrastructure. In the same way as was done with schools, there should have been a register of needs at these technical colleges to address infrastructural backlog.
“The institutions themselves will not be getting any money as it will go towards curriculum reform. In a real sense they are not getting any additional amounts,” Wildeman said.
The South Africa Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) said: “We trust that the Department of Education will redouble its efforts to role out the new FET [school] curriculum and ensure adequate training and materials are available.”
Last week Minister of Education Kader Asmal told the media that his department would abolish school fees in the poorest 40% of schools. But there was no explicit mention of this by Manuel, other than comments that there would be a renewed focus on learner support materials and facilities at disadvantaged schools.
But Wildeman said the additional funding for that process would come from the provincial education departments. “The equitable share given to provinces will increase substantially to handle that. I also do not think that school fees would just be abolished. My understanding is that they are going to make the process of charging fees slightly more difficult so that schools which want to charge have to apply and motivate why they must charge fees.
“But learners who qualify for some kind of social grant will automatically be exempt from paying fees,” he said.
Sadtu said its understanding was that the abolition of school fees for the poorest 40% of schools would only happen next year.
“There is a firm commitment that it would happen after the issue of supplying enough learning material is complete,” Sadtu said in a statement.
Manuel also announced that higher education restructuring process would receive a further R1-billion. Restructuring of higher education will result in a consolidated 21 institutions of higher learning from the current 36 technikons and universities.
“The simple answer to whether this [R1-billion] is enough is, ‘We don’t know,'” said Professor George Subotzsky, director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of the Western Cape.
He said the restructuring and merger process will have many hidden costs, so that the whole process will be “more costly than meets the eye — which in itself draws into question the rationale [that is, cost effectiveness] of the restructuring. Hidden costs include the time and effort institutions are pouring into the mergers,” he said.
“In all likelihood, this amount will not sustain the whole process.”
Salaries continue to dominate education expenditure but the government says the proportion has declined to 41% from 50% in 2000/01.