Address by Higher Education and Training Minister Dr Blade Nzimande at the South African Democratic Teachers Union National General Council, Kopanong Conference Centre, Ekurhuleni, September 11 2009

The role of Higher and Further Education and Training in a Developmental State

Comrades, thank you for the opportunity to address you on the role of higher education and training. As you are aware, the development of a high quality and accessible education system is one of the central tasks of our new government. This is not only in response to our electoral mandate but is something close to many of our hearts, including our President, Comrade Jacob Zuma.

Inherent in this mission is the desire to remove the footprint of apartheid from our education system and to model a landscape that reflects equality and our democratic values. As a developmental state, it is also necessary that our education and training system is responsive to the many needs of our economy. The rationale behind the redesign of education in government was therefore to attain a more dedicated focus on basic education on one hand and post school education and training on the other.

My department takes responsibility for higher education, the college sector (including the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges, and other colleges such as nursing and agricultural colleges), all post-literacy adult education, and workplace skills development. This latter sector includes the infrastructure of the SETAs, the National Skills Authority and the National Skills Fund, which will all be transferred by 1 November 2009 from the Department of Labour. This new development poses challenges and opportunities that require our collective thinking and participation.

The anchor of my department is to expand options for young people post school. The bringing together of Higher Education Institutions, FET Colleges and the Skills Sector into a single Department of Higher Education and Training provides a powerful basis for addressing education and training in an integrated way. My department has the responsibility to develop the country's education and training institutional capacity and resources into a coherent but diverse and differentiated post school learning system serving adults and youth within the framework of the Human Resource Development South Africa strategy.

This post school system for the country will be based on guiding principles which will include:

* The post schooling system will be planned as a single nationally coordinated entity of the highest quality with maximum articulation and portability.
* The system will be designed and operated to maximise equity of opportunity and outcome for youth and adults in and out of the labour market.
* The system will consist of a diverse and differentiated institutional base with institutional missions being appropriate to the needs of the country.

Within the four streams of the department, we have specific targets. For universities, our goal is to improve access and success, particularly of poor, African and women students. We want FETs to be colleges of choice, not what students settle for when they cannot get into universities. It is still our intention to increase the student enrolment at FET colleges to at least one million by 2015. We also aim to improve quality and capacity of the FET Colleges with a particular focus on artisans and other scarce skills, and as primary delivery sites for Adult Education and Training.

With regard to training, we need to increase graduate output in areas of skills shortages. Through a much needed review of the SETA landscape, we aim to ensure greater accountability, improved employment of resources, better management of funds and streamlining and alignment of their operations in order that they fulfil their role as a central cog of our skills training and job creation machinery.

Comrades, you may have heard me previously cite a worrying statistic which demonstrates the enormity of our challenge to rescue a generation of youth from financial and social depression. Research funded by the Ford Foundation shows that there are almost three million young South Africans between the ages of 18 and 24 years of age who are neither in employment, education or training. Simply put, this means that they are not working and not learning.

It cannot be business as usual when such a large number of young people in our country are faced with the prospect of such a bleak future. The higher education and training system must ensure that their prospects are substantially improved by the expansion of education and training opportunities in the universities, the colleges and the workplace.

We are all aware that our country is confronted with a shortage of skills, both high and middle level skills and on the flipside we have unacceptably high rates of unemployment. So we have many people without jobs and lots of jobs without the people able to do them.

The education and training system by itself cannot resolve the problem of unemployment, a more rapid rate of economic growth and faster job creation is necessary. But education and training can certainly play a critical role in this. In order to do so, its quality must improve and so must its capacity to educate and train more of our youth. This inevitably means bringing more black youth into the universities and colleges.

Comrades, this brings me to the role of South African Democratic Teacher's Union (SADTU) in assisting us to reach our strategic goals. The best way to bring more qualified youth into universities and colleges is obviously to improve the quality of our schooling system. Many committed teachers are daily making heroic efforts to provide their learners with a decent education. But it's clear that in many schools their efforts are being undermined by others. It is no secret that there are a great number of schools which are dysfunctional and where teaching and learning are minimal. It is also true that our children's learning achievements are not what they should be. This, comrades, is a serious blot on our education system and deadly to the culture of learning we are trying to cultivate.

Angie Motshekga will speak later on the Department of Basic Education's plans to improve schooling. But as the largest teacher union, SADTU is well placed to lead the national effort to prepare young people for a successful future, cooperating with the education departments and communities

As the kingpins of the education system, teachers are in the position to counsel and to empower children to further their studies according to the needs of our developmental state: above all by teaching them to read and write well, to understand mathematics and science, to better comprehend the world they live in and, in the words of the Freedom Charter, 'to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace'.

It is not an exaggeration to say that without teachers leading the process the schools will never become the kind of empowering institutions that our people have dreamed about for over a century. Teachers provide the only hope that many of our people have that their children will find their way out of poverty, unemployment and hopelessness.

This places an enormous responsibility on your shoulders because it means that without your total commitment to your noble profession and to uplifting the children of the workers and the poor, our revolution can never succeed and the doors of learning and culture will never be opened for ordinary South Africans.

Comrades, I know that I am asking a lot of you, especially given the difficult circumstances that many of you find yourselves in. I am also aware that the state also sometimes falls short in providing the kind of support that you need. The current government is now more committed than ever to working with you to achieve what needs to be achieved. Like you, the government also faces difficult situation and we need to hold hands and move forward together. Together we must identify the root causes of the malaise in many of our schools and try to rehabilitate those who do not take education seriously. Revolution was never an easy process and turning around the kind of dysfunctional and malignant education system that we inherited from apartheid will take hard work and sacrifice.

As an influential public sector trade union, I believe that SADTU has a more strategic role to play in the overall development of a functional, high quality education system. The establishment of the two education departments should go beyond narrow, bureaucratic processes and must include input and cooperation from all sectors of society, including organised labour. SADTU is a powerful voice in education and therefore needs to partner government on its journey of Continuity and Change. This means that we should build on the positives in the system and remedy what is wrong.

While teacher development is the primary responsibility of the Department of Basic Education, my department seeks to strengthen teacher education for the foundation phase and to ensure that our country produces enough new teachers to meet our needs in the future, including in areas of serious shortage such as maths, science and African Languages. The issue of teacher training colleges was put on the agenda by the ANC election manifesto.

The closure of the colleges resulted in two serious unintended consequences: one was that our ability to produce enough teachers was seriously compromised and the other was that teacher education became less accessible, particularly to rural people. These were serious problems and we are working on strategies to overcome them. Our universities do have the capacity to increase the number of teachers that they train if the resources are available.

The Fundza Lushaka bursary scheme was introduced to provide these resources by offering bursary to young people for whom teacher education had become unaffordable. This scheme has helped to recruit more students into teacher training over the last two years but still needs to be expanded further. Plans are now in place to do just this. We have also started to look into the question of how to make teacher education facilities available to young people in rural areas, but this takes a great deal of organisation and planning.

In the period since the teacher education summit in early July, as you know, a number of working groups which include both departmental officials and teacher representatives have been set up to look at the recommendation of the summit. One of these (on institutional arrangements) is looking into the idea of teacher colleges and I urge SADTU as the largest teacher union to play an active part in the deliberations of this and other working groups and examines all the issues with an open mind so that the best solutions can be found.

As I mentioned earlier, most SADTU members work in institutions that come under the Department of Basic Education and the provincial Departments of Education. However there is one detachment of SADTU members that will before too long come under the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and that are the FET College lecturers once the colleges are transferred from provincial control to the DHET.

Both Departments of Higher Education and Training and Basic Education have transitional mechanisms to ensure the smooth transfer of FET colleges from provinces to national. This process has a number of challenges including the employment status of FET college lecturers and governance structures. We invite all teacher unions, including SADTU, to engage with this process in order to ensure that we do indeed reposition public FET colleges to play a leading role in the much-needed skills revolution in our country.

The restructuring of the colleges and the current uncertainties have, I know, created insecurity among the lecturers. I am not in a position to go into a detailed discussion now, but I want to assure them that we are committed to ensuring their security and that their conditions keep pace with those of teachers.

Comrades, we cannot realise the true meaning of a developmental state unless the working class takes a lead role in the transformation effort in our country. All our strategic tasks are dependent on the cooperation and active participation of the workers. The elephant in the room however is the current economic crisis and how it threatens to undermine what we want to achieve. In order to minimise its impact, we need to focus on that which will keep the economy on track now and post the crisis. A performing and quality education system is certainly something to focus on as we weather the storm.

Critical in all this is the need to wage a relentless campaign against the capture of the state by corporate interests, roll back the intersection of the holding of public office and business interests, as well as intensifying the struggle against corruption on all fronts. The trade union movement, as the most organised detachment of the working class, must be the eyes and ears of state and society as a whole.

Central in the transformation of education as a whole is the need to build local people's education committees in all our communities, including building vibrant school governing bodies and institutional forums in all our education institutions, both in basic and higher education. SADTU has a particular responsibility to lead the process of the mobilisation of the entire education sector to achieve the goal of People's Education for People's Power.

Comrades, once again thank you for the invitation to address you and we look forward to the outcomes of this National General Council.

I thank you.

Statement issued by the Department of Higher Education and Training, September 11 2009

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