Over the past few days the fate of the education system and the delicate nature of political trade-offs were in sharp focus. The Western Cape education department announced that it would be dropping the austerity guillotine on its teaching workforce to cut more than 2, 400 jobs from the beginning of 2025.
The underlying reason for the decision is the national austerity drive implemented by the National Treasury that various departments have been asked to factor into their planning. In the basic education portfolio the implication of the funding crunch is that provincial departments have to figure out how to contain costs, account for inflationary increases and work with reduced budget allocations.
The nature of the portfolio is that personnel costs — primarily front-line teaching staff — account for a big part of the budget. In some provinces more than 80% of the budget funds teachers’ compensation. But running a school requires infrastructure, resources and complementary services such as feeding schemes and transport. These have to compete for the fraction of the budget that remains after compensation is factored in.
When budgets fall short each department has to manage difficult trade-offs to balance the books. Given the critical and primary role played by teachers, reducing their numbers should be the last thing any decisionmaker considers. The implication of cutting teachers is that the burden on the remaining staff escalates and increased class sizes compromise the learning experience. The process of identifying who ought to be released from the system also invites new headaches.
Historically, the last-in first-out principle dominated the approach to staff rationalisations, in which the most recent recruits were the first ones to be considered for offboarding. The problem with such a model is that it can lead to suboptimal staffing if new employees are involved in critical teaching areas. Losing them can compromise the holistic offering each school desires. The already dire performance data relating to literacy and numeracy levels within the basic education system suggest more and better-skilled teachers are required.
Economic limbo
The impending formalisation of the preschool years in the basic education system — a critical part of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill that has attracted so much attention in recent days — means the basic education system requires more resources. In a country where poor management of public resources has left little left to spare and the economic growth required to fund the national imperatives has been lacking, it was inevitable that even the most fundamental services would eventually be subject to the purse pinch.
The problem with treating education like any other portfolio is that it escalates the problem into a multigenerational crisis. Underinvesting in education means already suboptimal outcomes get worse. When a suboptimal system condemns a generation of learners to economic limbo with marginal participation and contribution to the economy, the country not only fails to grow the resources required to fund national imperatives but the reliance on social services by those with no means to eke out their own way through the daily grind, means even more is required to maintain a semblance of stability.
For most of the past two decades SA has simply borrowed its way out of these problems with the hope that organic turnarounds would magically materialise. As it turned out, life simply does not work that way and we are once again reminded that failure to engage in difficult but necessary deliberations about the national pathway to prosperity has real consequences.
Usually the impact of austerity measures is expressed in abstract terms such as baseline reductions or adjustments that make it difficult for many to translate it into tangible effects. In this case the implications will be visible not only in the bloated classrooms of next year, but in the shape of the education system in the years to come.
• Sithole is an accountant, academic and activist.
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