Basic education budget cuts ‘exacerbate inequalities and undermine right to education’ – civil society groups

Civil society organisations have urged the government to prioritise funding for schools, teachers and education infrastructure after Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube outlined severe budgetary shortfalls in provincial education departments on Wednesday, 25 September 2024.

The minister provided an update on the budget cuts faced by the provinces, which could lead to teacher cuts, following a meeting last week with the nine provincial education MECs at the Council of Education Ministers Meetings.

Gwarube said the financial crisis had been “years in the making because of aggressive budget cuts, economic stagnation and fiscal mismanagement across government which is now set to impact schools”.

On Wednesday, Department of Basic Education CFO Patrick Khunou said that consolidated budget pressures between 2021/22 and 2027/28 were estimated to amount to between R78-billion and R118-billion across the provinces.

Gwarube said that over the past three years, provincial departments largely avoided retrenchments, but did not offer new posts, despite the number of learners in schools increasing by more than 290,000 over the past five years.

“Several provinces have preserved the same post basket for the past three academic years, despite learner numbers increasing, while other provinces have decreased their posts in the past three years. It is important to note that these have been cuts in posts but not warm bodies, meaning that no person gets retrenched, but rather vacancies are not filled.”

Read more: Education budget cuts — Gwarube targets graft, SOE bailouts, seeks urgent finance minister meeting

Officials said that from the current financial year until 2027/28, the provincial breakdown in education budget shortfalls were as follows:

• KwaZulu-Natal: R26.7-billion to R38.9-billion;


• Gauteng R20-billion;


• Mpumalanga R4.3-billion to R17.2-billion;


• Eastern Cape R11.8-billion;


• Free State, which gave information only up to the year ending 26/27, has a shortfall of between R7.7-billion and R9.7-billion;


• Western Cape R4.4-billion to R6.3-billion;


• Northern Cape R2.2-billion to R8.5-billion;


• North West R600-million to R2.7-billion;


• Limpopo R500-million to R2.1-billion.

Gwarube said, “To fully grasp why we are here and more importantly how we got here, we must look back and acknowledge that as a government, we have not made the right choices at the right time – which has brought us to this point.

“First and foremost, our economy has been stagnant for nearly a decade. Growth rates have remained below 1% in real terms, which is far below what is needed to generate sufficient tax revenue to fund our public services, including education. Without a growing economy, government revenues shrink, and when revenues shrink, so do our budgets,” Gwarube said.

Vulnerable learners worst affected

The Budget Justice Coalition, which includes SECTION27, Equal Education and other advocacy groups, expressed deep concern.

“These budget constraints provide context for potentially ‘brutal’ budget cuts in the words of the minister. Budget cuts towards basic education will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, exacerbating existing inequalities and undermining South Africa’s constitutional guarantee of the right to basic education,” the BCJ said in a statement.

“We urge policymakers to prioritise education spending, ensuring sufficient funding for schools, teachers, resources and infrastructure.”

Since 2018, the coalition has been actively advocating for quality education by submitting reports to Parliament, highlighting the devastating impact of budget cuts on basic education.

“Potential education budget cuts affect hiring and retaining teachers. The 2024/25 Budget’s proposed 3.2% increase in compensation for basic education personnel, from R235.3-billion to R241.9-billion, may have seemed like a step forward; it actually translated to a 2.2% real cut once inflation at the time was factored.

“This reduction has done little to address the pressing issue of understaffing in our public schools, which has been a concern for years. The National Treasury has long recognised that these budget allocations jeopardise education outcomes, leading to larger class sizes and higher teacher-to-learner ratios,” the coalition said.

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba has also expressed concern.

In a statement on his address at an Opening of the Anglican Church’s ruling Synod, released on Wednesday, Makgoba said, “In the sea of unemployment in which we are drowning, cutting education budgets spells disaster.

“If we are to educate a modern workforce, we should be increasing investment in education, not reducing it. Adopting ‘austerity measures’ in the fields of education, health and social welfare is a recipe for trouble.”

‘Teachers doing more with less’

The national spokesperson of the second-largest union in the education sector, the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA (Naptosa), Basil Manuel, said, “The minister hasn’t said anything new or different to what we know.”

“We’ve been lamenting about the same things. Any undertaking that says we are saving the posts is not exactly true, because as soon as a province lets some teachers go, it is retrenchment and the Western Cape has already indicated that, and there are temporary teachers who are losing posts… So there is a reduction in the number of posts.”

Read more: South Africa’s provincial education departments face a crippling budget shortfall of billions of rands 

On Wednesday, Gwarube said bailouts for state-owned enterprises, wasteful expenditure, corruption and above-inflation increases had contributed to the spending crunch.

Manuel agreed there had been budget cuts over some time due to SOE bailouts and potential corruption, but disagreed that teacher salary increases were a cause of the current problem.

“Now, the minister obviously is not exactly aware of the fact that teachers haven’t had a salary increase since 2021-2022. They had no increase.They had an increase in 2023 for the first time. Now, you can’t tell me that that is outstripping the level of inflation. It’s not true – it was an inflationary increase after three years of no increase,” said Manuel.

Manuel says the labour organisation will be fighting for salary increases this year to “foreground teachers’ salaries when the number of learners has increased by almost 300,000 and the number of teachers hasn’t increased… Teachers are doing more with less, but what we do agree with is that we’ve got to meet with the powers that be,” Manuel said.

Gwarube said she had requested an urgent meeting with Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana as well as the nine provincial finance MECs.

Recommendations

The Budget Justice Coalition said a human rights-centred alternative fiscal approach would help curb cuts to important services such as school transport, the national school nutrition programme and learning materials.

“We urge the government to explore innovative fiscal approaches that safeguard the right to basic education for underserved communities. The uptake of utilising the Gold and Foreign Exchange Contingency Reserve Account (GFECRA) demonstrates that alternative solutions exist to reduce the budget deficit without further compromising public spending.”

The coalition also recommended:

• Leveraging the Government Employees Pension Fund to purchase bonds at favourable rates.


• Implementing progressive tax reforms including eliminating tax rebates for high-income earners.


• Revising the education component of the Provincial Equitable Share formula to account for resource disparities between learners and schools in their respective provinces.


• Revising post-provisioning norms, since some provinces currently spend less on educator salaries in no-fee schools than they do in fee-charging schools.

The coalition said a review of the Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations Act could provide an opportunity to rebalance resource allocation and strengthen the state’s capacity to deliver on its human rights obligations.

“A forward-thinking government must harness these funding mechanisms to foster sustainable growth, outpace debt interest costs in the long term and promote economic transformation. Effective public investment management and domestic resource mobilisation are critical to achieving fiscal sustainability and promoting economic growth,” the coalition said. DM