GOOD Statement by Brett Herron ,
GOOD Secretary-General
16 January 2025
After approving a balanced budget 10 months ago, promising to employ more teachers this year, the Western Cape Education Department changed its mind and determined that 2400 teacher posts would be scrapped – blaming the situation on a shortage of resources from an incompetent national government.
Today it announced that although the 2400 posts had indeed been scrapped, 477 new teacher posts have been created to alleviate its self-made crisis.
The reason it’s a crisis of the Western Cape’s own making is because the province receives more than enough money from the national fiscus to retain its full complement of teachers, but uses the discretion provinces have to take money away from education and plough it into other projects and programmes.
On the last day of November, at a meeting of the provincial education committee, the province was adamant it had no option but to fire 2400 teachers as it simply had no money. So where did the money for 477 new teachers suddenly spring from? Father Christmas?
If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s the point. It makes no sense to anyone besides the bean counters at the provincial department, and their political master, MEC David Maynier.
Irrespective of accounting blemishes, political shenanigans and blame games, creating 477 new teacher posts is good.
But not being able to account for the “facts” presented in its budget last March, and scrapping 2400 posts, is undoubtedly bad for the Western Cape’s children.
Besides which, it reflects a very low appreciation by the Education Department of the basic principles of accounting, and political accountability.
The national matric results released this week saw the self-proclaimed “exceptionally well run” Western Cape, in fifth place on the provincial rankings, with a pass mark below the national average.
Western Cape children require more from their education department than contradictions, mismanagement and politics.
MEC Maynier must come clean. Instead of falsely claiming, as he did, that creating 477 new teacher posts reflects the province prioritising education, he must explain to Western Cape parents why the province has deprioritised education by shifting resources for education to other cost centres.
While providing this explanation, it would be useful to know why the 477 posts were first publicly revealed (yesterday) by the Progressive Principals Association (PPA), whose member schools predominantly fall within the wealthier 4th and 5th quintiles.
According to these principals, the new teachers were funded through private contributions and would be sent to their schools – leaving the poorest of the poor schools ever further behind. Is that so, Mr Maynier?
Media enquiries:
Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General
Cell: 082 5183264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Samantha Jackson, GOOD: Media Manager
Cell: 083 5509875
Email: samantha@forgood.org.za