The education budget has increased from R127 billion in the 2008/9 financial year to R140 billion in 2009/10.
This was revealed by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel in his budget vote in Parliament on Wednesday.
Despite ongoing concerns over the poor return on the investment in education, it remains the government’s single largest investment. In the 2009/10 financial year education expenditure will total 17% of national expenditure.
Priority areas outlined in the education budget remain tightly aligned with the government’s broader poverty reduction
agenda as well as the Education Minister Naledi Pandor’s consistent focus on improving the quality of education.
They include increasing the number of no-fee schools and providing meals to more learners, reducing average class sizes in schools serving poor communities, increased spending on school buildings, improving training programmes for teachers and recapitalising technical high schools.
A key intervention expected to improve the quality of education includes a R6 million allocation in 2009/10 for the establishment of the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (Needu).
A further R12 million in 2010/11 and R13 million in 2011/12 will go to Needu in the medium term.
A ministerial committee led by educationist Jonathan Jansen recommended to Pandor that Needu be set up as an independent statutory body to provide authoritative accounts of schools and teachers in South Africa. The performance of learners will be an important indicator in these evaluations. Needu is seen as the revival of the defunct inspectorate system.
The government is also to increase funding to the poorest schools by increasing from 40 to 60% the number of no- fee schools. This will mean quintile one to three schools will be exempted from fees. Schools are divided into five quintiles and the government funding they receive is based on the socio-economic conditions of the communities in which they are based.
In support of the department’s pro-poor focus the nutrition programme for schools will now also include secondary schools in quintiles one to three, starting with the poorest quintile one schools this year.
The school nutrition programme conditional grant will increase from R577,3 million in 2009/10 to R1,3 billion and R2,1 billion by 2010/11.
This contributes to an annual increase of 28,3 percent in the department’s social and school enrichment programme, which deals with the social, health and safety matters in education. The ongoing investment in the government’s mass literacy campaign, Kha Ri Gude, is another reason for the rapid increase in this departmental programme.
About a 100 technical high schools will be recapitalised with R80 million next year and R200 million in 2011/12 providing them with infrastructure, new equipment and workshops to support quality curriculum delivery will be introduced from next year.
These schools, which believe they have an important role to play in providing skilled school-leavers for industries, have battled to do so in the light of diminished funding.
They believe the recapitalisation can be attributed to a meeting between technical schools and Pandor in May last year where they had an opportunity to share their concerns with the Education Minister.