The Western Cape government has sounded the alarm about the national government’s failure to fully fund the 2023 wage agreement, saying it has caused a fiscal crisis for education departments across SA.
The Treasury was left with a R37bn wage bill shortfall after the government agreed to a higher-than-anticipated settlement with unions. Personnel-heavy provincial departments such as education have been forced to cut their budgets, scaling back spending plans across the board.
The Western Cape announced last week that it would cut 2,400 teacher posts in January as it faced a R3.8bn budget shortfall over the next three years, despite shaving R2.5bn off its spending plans for administration, curriculum and infrastructure.
The planned teacher cuts represent a 6.5% reduction in the number of teachers currently employed by the province. The province said it would not seek to retrench teachers but some permanent teachers would be asked to move schools, and a number of contract teachers would not be reappointed after their contracts end on December 31.
“We are in this position because we are being short-changed by the national government, receiving only 64% of the cost of the nationally negotiated wage agreement and leaving the province to fund the remaining 36%. We are in an impossible position, and it is not of our making,” Western Cape education MEC David Maynier said on Sunday.
Citing figures presented to parliament last month, he said KwaZulu-Natal faced a budget shortfall of R4bn for the current fiscal year and could not afford to fund more than 11,000 teacher posts. It had also been forced to scale back on school transport and had delayed payments to suppliers.
Maynier said he had raised the matter at the council of education ministers and called for urgent action. “Teachers are our greatest asset, and reducing the number of teachers in our schools will negatively impact learning outcomes,” he said.
The Western Cape faced a growing demand for school places and had to accommodate more than 17,000 additional learners in 2023, he said. The planned reduction of teachers was set to worsen the average teacher:learner ratio from 1:34 to 1:37 next year, he said.
The Mpumalanga education department told MPs it faced a budget shortfall of R876m this year, while the North West said its stood at R485m.
Gauteng did not disclose the scale of its budget shortfall to parliament’s portfolio committee on basic education, but said it would have to reduce school transport and scale back its plans to expand access to early childhood development programmes.
The budget shortfalls are felt most acutely by schools serving SA’s poorest communities, as they have limited scope to raise additional funds from parents and receive little fee income that could be used to hire extra teachers through their school governing bodies.
National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA executive director Basil Manuel said the union had previously appealed to the national government to shield the departments of education, health and policing from austerity measures, to no avail.
“The tragedy is we will reap the bad seeds of this kind of decision,” he said. Reducing the number of teachers would add to the pressures on educators, who were battling with school discipline, the challenges of expanding mother tongue education to more children and the introduction of new, non-academic subjects.
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