Manuel spends billions on education

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 21 Feb 2008

Finance minister Trevor Manuel has responded to the ICT sector's pleas for education to be addressed, including at the pre-primary school levels.

Jan Rombouts, executive director for the non-profit tertiary IT institution the Belgium Campus, and ICT market-watcher Adrian Schofield recently both said it is necessary to go back to basics and address pre-primary education levels to enable specialised skills like ICT to be cultivated.

"Over the last five years, education standards in SA have been dropping," said Rombouts. "There is a need to focus on pre-primary education because what goes wrong there impacts on the rest of the education system."

"Each year that goes by without allocating funds to the whole spectrum of education, from pre-primary to tertiary, condemns another generation of young people to playing catch-up," added Schofield.

Addressing Parliament in his national budget speech yesterday, Manuel announced that education will receive the biggest slice of the expenditure pie in the coming financial year, while pre-school education is to be beefed up.

"Education is central to our objective of broadening opportunity and fighting poverty," said Manuel. "Over the next three years, provinces have budgeted to spend over R18 billion on school infrastructure and equipment. The expansion of early-childhood education to about 600 000 more children will put basic pre-school education within the reach of even the poorest of households."

Education received a total of R121.1 billion for the 2008/9 financial year. In addition, revenue related to skills development is to rise to more than R9 billion by 2010/11. According to Manuel, "by any measure, this is a substantial amount of money".

Quality concerns

It remains to be seen whether the higher education spend will address the education quality issues.

Schofield points out: "The low percentage of students achieving adequate pass rates has been a concern over many years and will continue to be so.

"It is also common cause that the country's investment in education has been insufficient to tackle the demand for our country's youth since 1994," he continues.

Rombouts says the Belgium Campus spends the first six months of all its courses catching students up on schoolwork because public education standards are not up to par.

"We have changed from lecturing to teaching for the first year in order to bridge the gap between high school and tertiary education," he says.

Rombouts says the demand for ICT graduates outstrips the supply by three-and-a-half to one, at this stage.

"It doesn't make sense in a country where unemployment is so high. The shortage of ICT professionals is tremendous in this country."