Provincial education budgets this year show a stark and widening gap between government policy aims and available funding. This is the main finding of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) in its analysis of these budgets.
As a result, apparently priority areas such as early childhood development (ECD), adult education and training, and education for learners with special needs will be especially hard hit, suggests Idasa researcher Russell Wildeman in his provincial education budget analysis, released this month.
”The cracks in funding of [these] key services are more self-evident in the 2004 budget than in previous years,” he writes.
Growth of 1,4% in provincial education budgets is projected for the next three years, and capital spending shows an overall positive growth. Resource inequalities across the provinces are declining — a welcome development — but this ”does not reflect deliberate state planning, and is consequently incorrectly credited to the actions of national and provincial agencies,” Wildeman argues.
”The main reasons are stagnant or low real growth in ‘rich’ provincial education budgets, a corresponding stronger real growth in ‘poor’ provincial education budgets, the migration of learners from poor to rich provinces, and the general decline in learner numbers in poor provinces.”
Even so, South Africa is some distance away from parity in provincial spending.
Equally urgent, Wildeman argues, is a national framework for ECD funding; otherwise young learners in poor communities ”will continue to bear the brunt of inadequate ECD spending”.
In the further education and training college sector, extremely small capital allocations mean ”there is simply no money” to address infrastructure deficits in the country’s 50 institutions.
”Provincial education departments appear stuck with unresponsive budgets that do not meet real spending needs,” Wildeman concludes.