Chairperson, if I have time, I am going to respond to that question. Hon Chair, South African parents have been waiting for 18 years to get quality education for their children. All they get, instead, are promises accompanied by glaring inefficiencies.
Education is lurching from crisis to crisis and much of the time of the Department of Education is spent on crisis management and damage control. It is very painful for us to be focused on failures, not because we want to dwell on them, but because we need them to be addressed with speed.
The foundation phase in postapartheid South Africa has to be the most important area of focus. It stands to reason that children must be made ready for schooling in order for them to benefit from receiving formal education. Yet, to the horror of Cope, as well as the dismay of mainly black parents, provinces in 2010-11 inexplicably decreased their spending on the foundation phase. The impact of this on the performance of learners is going to be very costly. Is this move supported by the national department? We would like to know. It is very important.
Equitable and progressive education begins with foundation education that is well supported and available to all. We in Cope have always understood that assessing foundation education was a national priority outcome. Why are provinces not aligning their objectives with those of the national department? On the delivery of textbooks, the Minister has been taken to court by parents and the Equal Education nongovernmental organisation, for failing to deliver textbooks in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces. The citizens of these two provinces are asking the government why they are being targeted for getting the short end of the stick. To rub salt into their wounds, textbooks are being discovered dumped in warehouses or sold off for next to nothing to business people. What kind of monitoring is in place to ensure that consignments of purchased books are delivered in their entirety?
South Africa has a system of co-operative governance and this should be supportive of joint monitoring by portfolio committees at the national and provincial levels. It seems to us in Cope that legislative oversight mechanisms are underdeveloped and that government does not have a clue about what is going on until the problem is exposed in the media.
We in Cope are very supportive of a free and unencumbered media, because we approve of futile and fruitless expenditure being exposed. The sad part is that government takes little or no action against those who are pulling down our education system.
Prof Habib is so frustrated, and he is right, of course, to think that the department has schizophrenia. What the department is seeing and what the rest of society is experiencing in respect of education do not seem to correlate.
The implementation of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement, Caps, is once again confusing teachers, as well as learners, who are having timetable challenges. One teacher told mourners at the funeral of a colleague, for example, that his colleagues were running away from Caps. He explained that while the teaching fraternity were still grappling with outcomes-based education, the department had introduced a new curriculum. He painted a dismal picture of an education system that was not moving forward at all, and he was right.
The need to open colleges of education to provide educators with short in- service courses is of paramount importance. Educators need to feel comfortable about a curriculum in order to teach that curriculum. We have always called for the reopening of colleges of education and we do so once again.
You will understand this issue if we explain it further. According to the General Household Survey of 2009, 44,3% of children in the age bracket 7 to 24 years in Mpumalanga and 42,6% in the North West were found not to be studying in 2009. The primary reason was the lack of money. What criteria are used by the department in the no-fee school system? What progress has been made by the department with reducing the number of quintiles to accommodate a greater number of learners?
If only half of our learners are accessing education, what kind of future will they have and what kind of economic growth will we have? [Time expired.][Applause.]