THE basic education portfolio committee announced that it would embark on an oversight to visit to KwaZulu-Natal to look at school readiness for the 2025 academic year.
Briefing the media during the weekly committee cluster media briefing on Thursday, committee chairperson Joy Maimela said the focus of their oversight visit would be to ensure learners were in class learning and teachers in class teaching as well as ensuring textbooks and stationery were delivered to all the schools.
“The visit will also focus on early childhood development, the implementation of scholar transport, nutrition and curriculum matters.
“We are to focus on monitoring provision of scholar transport in KZN but also will follow through with other provinces that are having the same challenges,” Maimela said.
She noted that there had been challenges in scholar transport in the Western Cape’s farm areas, where many parents raised issues about the shortfall in the provision of scholar transport, and the provincial department unable to provide answers for certain areas where they discontinued the service.
Maimela said they were concerned about admission challenges especially in the Western Cape and Gauteng, where there were still learners that were not placed at schools.
Last year, some learners were placed in schools in the Western Cape because they could not be placed earlier.
“Part of our visit will be engaging on the admission of learners and placement of learners especially in the two provinces.”
Maimela said the committee was extremely concerned about the budget cuts and their impact on what happen in the classrooms.
Several provincial education departments have indicated that the budget cuts will affect them, and the Western Cape has announced the reduction of 2 400 teaching posts for the 2025 academic year.
“We are grateful to those provinces that indicated that they would rather cuts other costs and not the number of educators in the systems.”
She said the impeding budget cuts pose a significant threat to the sustainability of teaching post and the overall quality of education.
“The situation necessitates urgent and coordinated effort from both the national and provincial education department to safeguard the future of learners and educators.
“We have been engaging with provincial education departments for some time now on this matter to encourage them to find solution to mitigate the impact of the budget cuts on the frontline services, partially teaching.
“We appeal to the provinces to retain the current number of teaching posts to avoid compromising the education outcomes. This is more important because we are going to implement the Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Act, which means Grade R classes are going to be compulsory and you need more qualified teachers at schools than cutting teachers.
“We will continuously engage provincial education departments to ensure that they safeguard the teacher jobs.”
mayibongwe.maqhina@inl.co.za