Basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube has requested an urgent meeting with her finance counterpart Enoch Godongwana as provincial education departments scramble to manage a collective budget shortfall of R28.7bn for this fiscal year.
The cash crunch is projected to soar to R118.2bn by 2027-28, according to estimates from the basic education department.
Godongwana and Treasury officials are finalising the medium-term budget policy statement, due to be announced on October 30, which offers some scope to adjust the February budget. The policy statement also typically signals changes to the government’s spending plans over the next three years.
Gwarube said she had requested a “10 by 10” meeting between herself, Godongwana, the nine MEC’s of education along with their counterparts in the Treasury.
“We must work together ... to unlock additional funds to alleviate the pressures facing the education sector, even if it is for the short term, and to prevent further cuts to teaching posts and critical support services like school nutrition and transport,” she said at a media briefing on Wednesday.
The Treasury was not immediately available to comment.
Provincial education departments raised the alarm about the budget pressures facing the sector in parliament in August, warning that tens of thousands of teachers’ jobs were on the line. While none of the provinces were planning retrenchments, many would be reducing the number of funded posts, which would lead to worsening teacher to pupil ratios, Gwarube said.
The immediate problem facing the education sector stems from the R37bn budget shortfall confronting the Treasury after the government agreed to a higher-than anticipated wage settlement with unions in April, two months after the 2024 budget had been finalised. Personnel-heavy departments such as education, health and policing were obliged to honour the wage agreement within the constraints of their allocated budgets, forcing them to curtail spending in other areas such as infrastructure.
Gwarube said the growing budget pressure facing provincial education departments stemmed from the previously ANC-led government’s poor handling of the economy, repeated bailouts of state-owned enterprises, rampant corruption and what she described as unsustainable increases to the public sector wage bill.
“Over the past 15 years, public sector salary increases have consistently outpaced inflation, with some years seeing increases as high as 8%-10%. While we must fairly compensate public servants, these above-inflation increases have rendered the public wage bill unaffordable, accounting for nearly 35% of government spending,” she said.
She called for a governmentwide review of its spending plans.
“The real solution is a governmentwide reprioritisation exercise. In my view, you have to prioritise the things that matter the most — teaching, healthcare, policing. We cannot fund things that are not critical,” she said.
The government spent R331bn bailing out state-owned enterprises from 2013 to 2023, a “staggering” figure that could have been directed to critical sectors such as education, healthcare and economic infrastructure development, she said.
Patrick Khunou, basic education department CFO, presented data on each province’s projected accumulated budget shortfall between 2021/2022 and 2027/2028, which ranged from a low of R2.1bn in Limpopo to a high of R38bn in KwaZulu-Natal.
Western Cape faces a projected accumulated budget shortfall of R6.3bn by 2027/28, while Gauteng expects to be short by R20.5bn at that stage, Khunou said.
John Kruger, an economist specialising in social policy financing, said the budget crisis came at a particularly tough time for the education sector.
“The pressure is very real. Covid-19 halted our learning improvements: we actually need to invest more to deal with those setbacks. If the cuts continue it will have an impact on learning in an already strained system,” he said.
SA’s education system performed badly compared with other countries with a similar level of spending per capita, such as Brazil and Indonesia, but it had been showing signs of improvement before the Covid-19 pandemic, Kruger said.
The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), which measured the reading skills of nine- and 10-year-olds in 57 countries, found the proportion of SA children who could not read for meaning had worsened from 78% in 2016, and attributed the slide in performance to the extensive school closures during the pandemic.
SA pupils lost an estimated 155 school days in 2020 and 2021 — equivalent to three-quarters of a school year. In a study published in 2022, researchers estimated that most pupils were a year behind where they would have been were it not for Covid-19.
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