FET College Expansion: Let SETAs die so colleges live
The Democratic Alliance (DA) admires the efforts of Higher Education & Training Director-General Professor Mary Metcalfe to breathe new life into the deeply dysfunctional Further Education & Training (FET) sector. However, by their own admission, the R13.288 billion in additional funding needed to get the FET colleges on track is simply not there. Minister Dr Blade Nzimande lacks the courage to disband the wasteful and inefficient SETAs and use the accumulated billions of the National Skills Fund to make industry-FET college collaborations productive.
Professor Metcalfe chaired the FET College Summit 3-4 September 2010 held in Boksburg. A task-team appointed earlier this year presented proposals to the stakeholder community to step up vocational training and the theoretical component of expanded apprenticeships and learnerships at our 50 public colleges. Proper planning for enrolment expansion from the current 120,000-220,000 (there is no agreement on the number) to over 1 million students received a high priority. With 2.8 million youth between the ages of 18-24 who are not working, training or studying, we desperately need the FET colleges to play a greater role in enhancing their future prospects.
The good plans will be undermined by the inability of Nzimande to find the money necessary to fund FET expansion with quality educational offerings. Either he must find the estimated R13.288 billion from the fiscus (highly unlikely under the current economic conditions) or he must redirect the wasteful SETA spending (and underspending) towards the FET colleges. Good at building bureaucracies, the African National Congress (ANC)-led national government is unwilling to dismantle them even when they are patently dysfunctional and corrupt. The SETAs operate better as patronage machines for crony-comrades than as providers of training excellence for our youth. That money needs to be put to better use.
The DA will present an alternative model for financing and developing the FET college sector. We will present a model for the gradual phasing out of the hopeless SETAs and their replacement by a demand-based industry-led training system that works, is efficient and provides opportunities of quality to those willing to learn and work, to Parliament. We will offer this to the Department as our contribution to quality education for the millions of young people lost as a result of poor planning and mere bureaucracy-building in the past. To work it will require Nzimande to stand up to his comrades in the unions and SETAs.
Statement issued by Dr. Wilmot James MP, Democratic Alliance Shadow Minister of Higher Education and Training, September 6 2010
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