Seeds of change: Improving outcomes is crucial to enhancing the economy

Change is expected in South Africa’s education sector over the coming years. Although the government has historically been willing to spend what it takes to make the desired improvements that are so frequently discussed in the media, such as addressing bureaucratic inefficiencies in the public sector, results have yet to materialise. Rather than continue on the same path, the government has been eyeing different strategies to better the education system.

One thing never in doubt in South Africa is the government’s commitment to education – it spends more in this area than any other. The budget for fiscal year 2011/12, which ended on 31 March, allocated R189.5bn ($23.19bn), or 19% of all expenditure, to the sector. In the three coming fiscal years, this allocation is forecast to rise by 6.7% a year. The logic is as follows: almost every South African considers unemployment to be the country’s chief problem and that a more educated or skilled workforce will be the solution.

LEARNING CURVE: One common explanation for why the heavy spending in South Africa has not translated into concrete improvements in the system is the regulatory and bureaucratic confusion that comes from so many groups having a role. “While there is duplication, overlap, incoherence, inconsistency and inappropriate functioning in much of our system, one lesson which we have learned is the difficulty of building new institutions,’’ according to the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) green paper. “This does not mean that nothing should change, but rather that, wherever possible, it is better to build on existing institutional strengths and work within the existing systems.’’ OVERSIGHT: The size of the problem, the amount of money thrown at it and the difficulty in getting results is a frustrating and familiar condition. Bureaucratic confusion is one of the issues, and the 2009 reorganisation of the government departments and agencies involved may help to solve this. There are now two main government ministries overseeing education at the national level: the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and DHET. The latter has not yet had the time to make an impact, however, DHET is now in the process of researching specific details to add to the broad-brush plans it has already announced.

A green paper outlining the challenges and ambitions of reforming the sector was released in January 2012 by DHET, and, following a period of public input, which was scheduled to end in April 2012, work was set to begin on a white paper – a more specific document outlining a strategy for obtaining better results from universities, vocational schools, training programmes and other continuing-education efforts.

SIZE AND SCOPE: The regulatory bodies work nationally, and research and planning are also carried out at this level. The job of running schools, however, falls to the nine provinces. South Africa’s legislature is currently considering an amendment to the country’s constitution that could create a system in which the actual delivery of services becomes the shared responsibility of both national and provincial governments. The legislation under consideration would shift responsibility for vocational and adult-education programmes to the national government. DHET would then assume full responsibility of that aspect of the system.

According to a 2011 DBE report, more than 12m pupils were taught by 400,000 teachers in over 25,000 primary and secondary schools across the country in 2009. Of that total, about 11m were enrolled in 24,699 publicly funded schools, taught by 387,837 educators.

The tertiary level comprises 23 universities, 50 further education and training (FET) colleges and over 3000 continuing-education facilities, such as community centres offering continuing education courses. In an indication of how statistics are often seen as unreliable because of a lack of precise inventories, DHET estimates that there are anywhere from 8000 to 12,000 private post-secondary training institutes.

Along with DHET and the DBE, the government has established a variety of organisations and agencies, which have an impact on the sector. The National Qualifications Framework Act of 2008 is the main law governing standards for learners, while the South African Qualifications Authority was established to oversee its development and implementation. The Council on Higher Education (CHE) is a regulator for tertiary institutions and the National Skills Authority is an advisory body to the Ministry of Labour. Higher Education South Africa (HESA), founded in 2005, is an association of public sector universities the role of which is to regulate admission standards and also contribute to research to tertiary education. Umalusi is a quality-assurance body for private schools. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme, meanwhile, is the main provider of student loans and was created in 1999. By 2008, it was funding about one-fifth of students. It is largely financed through DHET’s budget, with disbursements to students in 2011 totalling R6bn ($734.4m).

THE SYSTEM: The South African Schools Act of 1996 mandates a compulsory nine years of general education. Students are required to start year one at age 6 or 7. An additional three years of secondary school is required to be able to progress to a tertiary programme. An optional pre-school year called Grade 0 or Grade R (for reception) is also offered.

Administrative expenses account for roughly 10% of costs at South African schools, and regulations address historical inequalities by mandating that the 40% of schools considered the poorest are allocated 60% of the provinces’ education budget, which includes spending on provision and also on the schools themselves, such as providing electricity and flush toilets, as well as expanding classroom capacity. From 2006 to 2011, the number of overcrowded public schools fell from 50% to 24%, according to the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE). In 1997, fees were abolished at 40% of schools serving the poorest school catchment areas. Private schools are also an option, serving a variety of income brackets (see analysis).

Parents whose children are in the public system and who can afford to do so have tended to play a large role in supplementing school budgets, paying for extra facilities to be built and for more and better-paid teachers. At these schools, formerly known as “Model C’’ and now called “Section 21’’, the student-to-teacher ratio is about 30:1, as opposed to 40:1 or 50:1 in poorer districts. A court in December 2011 gave public school districts the right to control admissions, denying the power of individual schools to do so. They retain, however, the autonomy to set fees, although there are prescribed rules for enrolling students who cannot pay. If this results in a significant increase in the number of children enrolling in the suburban public schools, it could push more fee-paying parents in the public system to opt for private schooling with better pupil-student ratios, according to Felicity Coughlan, the director of the Independent Institute of Education, which owns private schools. That may end up reducing the burden on the government by leaving it with fewer children to educate, but it could also cause a migration of teachers from public to private facilities, which would exacerbate a shortage that already exists.

CURRENT GOALS: Moves to improve results in specific subjects are key to the long-term agenda. Students are lagging in maths and sciences, and that has, in part, been attributed to the pressure public school principals face to deliver better results on standardised testing. The DBE’s Schooling 2025 plan is a long-term system outlining overarching goals and methods to monitor progress.

Moreover, the DBE has set several short-term goals to be met by 2014, including raising the number of students who complete year 12, the matriculation year, to 225,000. Improvement is also targeted in the national assessments for language and mathematics, taken at years three, six and nine, from a current range of 27-38% to at least 60%. Another aim for 2014 is to have all children enter the system through the optional Grade R year, with least 37% having participated in some sort of early childhood development programme first. Finally, the number of year-12 students who pass the national examination required to begin a bachelor’s degree at university is targeted to rise from 105,000 to 175,000, some 78% of all graduates.

The pass rate for the standardised test required for year-12 students was 67.8% for those in the class of 2010 wishing to continue on to university. Widely known as the “matric’’, performance on this test is perhaps the broadest and most often cited benchmark in the system. The 2010 results were an improvement on previous years – the rate had been in decline since 2005. However, that news must be put in context, said Coughlan. “Even though the pass rate is picking up, only about half of those who start school finish.”

The private sector also looks set to play a prominent role in education, and private facilities have emerged to fill a gap left by the public sector by offering education for any budget, ranging from first-rate schools charging top-rate prices to inexpensive and often unregulated outfits (see analysis).

TERTIARY: When South Africa entered its post-apartheid era, the new leadership initially placed a priority on making sure all children had access to an education. Matters of quality and post-secondary access are now being put at the top of the agenda, with DHET as a driving force behind the evolutionary process.

The new government in 1994, took over a public system with 36 universities and 152 technical colleges, all of which were administrated and funded differently, and the quality of which varied widely. In an effort to standardise the sector, some of the universities were merged or reformed, and now the current total of public universities is 23. As of 2011, there were about 899,120 students enrolled at university, including part-time and distance-learning programmes. In 1994, the number was just shy of 500,000. As of 2009, according to DHET figures, 82% of the total were undergraduates.

Policies to encourage non-whites to attend have also succeeded. As of 1994, 55% of students were black, Indian or mixed-race South Africans. The number had jumped to 80% by 2010. Blacks alone comprised 67% of the system, but accounted for 60% of graduates – an indication that other groups are faring better.

Among the 23 universities, a unique model is that of the University of South Africa (UNISA), established in Cape Town in 1872. For much of its life, it has been considered the finest university in the country, and has since become primarily a distance-learning school, offering a combination of academic and technical courses.

ISSUES TO TACKLE: DHET’s green paper serves as a statement of its early diagnostic efforts on the post-secondary education environment: “Structural challenges include skills bottlenecks, especially in priority and scarce skills areas; low participation rates; distortions in the shape, size and distribution of access to post-school education and training; as well as quality and inefficiency challenges in the system and its sub-systems and in institutions.’’ The green paper notes that it is not currently possible to understand the existing options for post-secondary school students because reliable statistics describing major aspects of the education sector are not available. A coordination process to collect, sort and analyse that type of data is now on the agenda.

There is also a stated need to do a better job in matching graduates’ skills with employers’ needs. An estimated 65% of all students at college cannot get the workplace experience they need to complete certain kinds of work-study diploma programmes, according to DHET. The majority of colleges have no formal linkages with industry or other employers, which would help students fulfil that requirement.

Quality of instruction is another issue, and plans are currently in development to improve teacher training. A separate challenge, however, is keeping teachers in their classrooms. Workers/employees in South Africa are highly unionised, and strikes and protracted negotiations are a common problem across most areas of the economy. The impact this has on students at public schools is a major reason why those who can afford to opt to pay for private education. “The teachers union is very protective of their environment,’’ said Duma Malaza, the former chief executive of HESA. “This has been a major roadblock to solving the core issue of poor-quality basic education.”

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: In accordance with its role as the African continent’s biggest economy and most developed country, South Africa’s schooling system is also an important resource for other Africans, for whom the country’s offerings are more advanced than what is available in their own countries. International students are most commonly found at the post-secondary level, and, according to DHET figures, in 2010, there were 66,113 foreigners enrolled at public institutions and about 6000 at private ones.

Whereas in other countries foreign students can be a source of revenue because they tend to pay full tuition fees, that is not the case in South Africa. As a member of the South African Development Community (SADC), the region’s political and economic cooperation group, the country must adhere to the SADC Protocol on Education and Training, which requires its members to treat students from other countries in the group as locals when calculating the cost of tuition.

DHET figures show that about 70% of the 66,113 foreign tertiary students come from SADC-member states. Most of the rest come from other African countries. Those from the developed world (slightly over 5000 Europeans, North Americans and Australians, according to DHET) are a testament to the globally competitive standards at some of the country’s flagship universities, such as the University of Cape Town and Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES: In a reverse of the perception at the primary and secondary levels, it is public universities that are the prestigious option at the tertiary level. There are 116 private alternatives, which between them have a market share of about 9%. Private post-school education has only been subject to regulation since 2000. Most would argue that it has improved quality, but the cost of compliance is high, monitoring is not universal and the capacity to apply the regulations and standards equally is limited, resulting in uneven application of requirements, according to Coughlan. Though there are increasingly more regular audits, more frequent oversight is required.

A group of private higher-education providers worked together with CHE to survey the sector and provide a report. Their survey was sent out in 2010, and responses from the latter half of that year were compiled into a report titled “Private Higher Education 2011”. In addition to a basic inventory of the private schools, their sizes and offerings, the report found that government agencies could not agree on consistent terminology or enrolment figures and requirements.

In the same way that universities were combined, the government addressed disparities between technical colleges between 2002 and 2006. Those reforms have led to a system of 50 colleges at around 250 locations, according to DHET. In subsequent years, recapitalisations and training programmes upgraded teaching capacity and facilities, which are known as FET colleges. As of 2010, there were roughly 325,000 students taking courses at these schools.

TEACHERS: Across all segments of the public system a key issue is the introduction of more qualified teachers. Training quality is considered a problem. According to a report by the National Planning Commission, an office that reports to the president and is charged with overall long-term economic planning and goals, the typical teacher scored less than the minimum expected from the average student on tests that were taken in 2008. The average scores of teachers who completed tests in 2008 in their own disciplines were 76% in literacy, 33-40% in maths and 69% in science.

The problem of sourcing qualified staff is more acute when viewed through a racial lens. In the post-apartheid era, trained black job seekers are at a premium in most economic sectors, and education is no different. Given that qualified black teachers are more likely to gravitate towards higher paying jobs before landing in the classroom, they are often more difficult to come by.

One of DHET’s primary goals in its five-year plan is to increase the number of teachers who have gone through training programmes at the tertiary level. The DBE is aiming to attract more people to the teaching profession though a scholarship programme called the Funza Lushaka Bursary Scheme. Student expenses covered include tuition, room and board, learning materials, and other living expenses. The costs of a Bachelor’s of Education degree or a one-year postgraduate Certificate in Education are covered for participants, who in return must teach at a school selected by the state, typically in an underserviced area, for the same number of years they received the bursary.

OUTLOOK: South Africa’s education system suffers from several problems familiar in many developing or middle-income countries, such as a lack of institutional capacity and regulatory confusion. It also has some unique issues thanks to its history and racial mix. The sector leaders confronting these profound problems, can at least enjoy the momentum of support – nearly all South Africans believe education is the key to solving the unemployment problem, which subsequently will free the economy to grow faster, heal old wounds and allow for a new era to take shape. The sector receives a large share of the national budget, and the next step is to get a better return on that investment.