Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube said her department has been meeting with the National Treasury and is hopeful the sector will get a reprieve from a dire cut when the medium term budget is announced next month.
Members of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) held a protest outside the Anton Lembede Mathematics, Science and Technology Academy in La Mercy as Gwarube visited on Wednesday, saying budget cuts would have a severe impact on teaching and learning.
They also raised concerns over the slow implementation of the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Act, which was signed into law last month.
Gwarube last month said provincial departments were facing a national crisis and needed to cut their budgets between R79 billion and R118bn in the next three years to meet their objectives.
The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, which has the largest number of pupils in the country, will face the most severe cut of between R26.7bn and R38bn in the next three years.
Gwarube, her deputy Makgabo Reginah Mhaule and education MEC Sipho Hlomuka, met on Thursday with officials from the provincial department.
The minister said that she had assured the provincial department that the matter was being addressed with Cabinet and in meetings with Treasury. “We are hoping that, really, by the end of next month, when the Minister of Finance (Enoch Godongwana) tables the medium term budget policy statement, we will be able to see some kind of reprieve for the sector.
“We know that the Minister has a lot of other balancing acts, but we do believe that health and education are critical portfolios, and we need to do everything we can to protect our frontline services.”
She said learners like those at Anton Lembede MST school “would not be as brilliant as they are if they did not have an educator in every single classroom giving them the kind of individual attention that they need”.
“If we want to see this replicated in other parts of not only KwaZulu-Natal, but in other parts of the country, we have to make sure that we keep the learner and the teacher in class and protect teaching and learning time.”
On the Bela Act, the minister said it had been signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa , who suspended the commencement of clauses in sections four and five.
Clause four of the Act relates to the provincial department being responsible for the admitting of pupils into a public school, taking away the responsibility of school governing bodies (SGB), while clause five sees the power of determining a school’s language policy move from the SGB to the provincial department.
Gwarube said these clauses are subject to a presidential process of consultation and her department will be led by the outcomes of the consultation.
“With regards to the rest of the Act, we have already started to make sure that we are on-boarding provinces so that we can begin with the implementation.
“It is very important to realise that there are critical aspects of the bill that we are looking to implement, the sections for instance that talk about the criminalisation of corporal punishment.”
Sadtu’s provincial secretary, Nomarashiya Caluza, said their members held a protest on Thursday as they were not happy that the minister had failed to attend the signing of the Bela Bill last month. She accused Gwarube of inciting unnecessary panic in the education sector regarding budget cuts saying “it was not as dire as it was being made out to be.
“Only the Western Cape indicated that they would be cutting 2 000 posts and we are under the impression that reprioritising the budget will ensure posts are not cut.”
She said in KwaZulu-Natal, the department had recently advertised posts.
The Mercury