Durban — KZN Education MEC Mbali Frazer has promised to prioritise employing more teachers and said she understood the negative impact of the shortage of teachers in schools.
She said the department had been relentlessly hit by budget cuts. This had led to the need for reprioritisation of the funds towards the most critical areas to help the department ensure that the provision of quality education to pupils was not compromised.
“Unfortunately, the budget reductions were implemented mainly against the compensation of employees allocation. This created a challenge in filling vacant posts at all levels of the department. With the decreased budget, several teacher posts are unaffordable in this financial year. The department also has 365 critical nonteacher posts that are not filled,” she said.
She added that pupils should not be deprived of quality education and recalled the mandate of the department, to ensure efficient curriculum delivery, and said this would not happen if schools did not have adequate teachers.
“When I was appointed as the MEC for education, I made a commitment that I would see to it that the department commenced with the process of filling some of the vacancies. This will also include employing unemployed graduates. We may not be able to fill all the vacant posts in one go, but we must start somewhere,” said Frazer.
She further said the expenditure incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the unfunded cost of damage to infrastructure during the December storms and April/May floods, did not allow for the provision of additional funding towards this end, in the current financial year.
The department had additional funding of R4.4 billion which was made up mainly of the wage agreement of R1.7bn and spending on infrastructure and the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative (PYEI) of R1.3bn given to it.
Moreover, the department experienced an overspend of almost R2.5bn, and towards the end of the year it was projected at R1.3bn.
Daily News