We are doing everything we can to fight for our teachers, but the national government only provided 64% of the cost of the nationally negotiated wage agreement, leaving the province to fund the remaining 36%.

Despite implementing a drastic R2.5 billion non-personnel budget cut, we still face a R3.8 billion budget shortfall over the next three years.

To remain fiscally stable, we will have no choice but to reduce the basket of educator posts in 2025.

No. Some contract teachers will not be reappointed after their contracts end on 31 December 2024, and some permanent teachers will be asked to move to another school where there is a suitable vacancy.

Around 2 100 educators leave our system each year, for reasons such as relocation or resignation, so there will be vacancies that will open up for excess permanent teachers to move to, or for contract teachers to apply for.

No. There will be contract appointments next year, but a school must first consult the list of permanent teachers that need to be placed in another post, and provide proof that there is not an eligible excess teacher to fill the position. They will then have to submit a motivation for the contract appointment.

The option to convert contract appointments to permanent ones is also available until 1 December 2024, which would see a contract teacher become a permanent teacher in specific qualifying posts.

No. In fact the opposite is true.

We sped up the conversion of contract appointments in qualifying permanent posts, and widely encouraged schools to apply for these conversions.

Between January 2024 and August 2024, we converted 5 000 contact appointments to permanent ones. A further 443 are currently in progress.

So it would be entirely incorrect to say that this process is slow or delayed.

Schools received their revised staff establishment (number and type of posts) for 2025 on 30 August 2024.

Schools will now work with the district office on determine which posts will be affected and communicate with the teachers in those posts over the coming weeks.

The formula determining how the total number of teaching posts gets divided between schools is prescribed by the national government according to their agreement with teachers’ unions. We are not able to deviate from the formula they have agreed to.

The formula takes into account class sizes, the workload of teachers, the size of the school, language, curriculum, poverty, and other factors.

Yes. We made the decision to exclude Special Needs schools from a reduction in posts, given the nature of their teaching and learning environment.

The decision by the national government to not fully fund the 2023 multi-year wage agreement has caused a fiscal emergency in all provincial education departments.

This is why all provinces are working together through the Council of Education Ministers to approach National Treasury with a clear picture of how devastating the decision not to fund the wage agreement has been for provincial education departments.

The Western Cape is not the only province affected, and other provinces indicated the challenge they are facing during their presentations to the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education in the National Assembly on 20 August 2024.

KwaZulu-Natal has indicated that they currently cannot afford 11 092 of their educator posts. They have a budget shortfall of R4 billion for this year alone, and they have had to reduce Norms and Standards payments to schools and delay paying service providers.

Mpumalanga has a budget pressure of R876 million that it must resolve, while the North West has to find R485 million.

The Northern Cape has had to, in their words, implement a “drastic removal of a large number of vacant posts” from their organisational structure, but still won’t be able to deal with their shortfall.

Gauteng has indicated that they will have to reduce learner transport, and they will not be able to expand Early Childhood Development (ECD) coverage as planned.

The wage agreement was announced in March 2023 and covers the 2023/4 increase AND the 2024/25 increase. We should have received the extra funding to pay for the increase in the national Mid Term Budget in late 2023.

But during the Mid Term Budget, the national government announced that it would not be paying for this agreement in full, despite national government negotiating it with the unions. Our department received only 64% of the increase cost, leaving us with a R3.8 billion shortfall over three years.

The massive shortfalls for us and other provinces are a direct result of the decision by the national government to not fully fund the 2023 multi-year wage agreement.

Circuit managers and districts will be working closely with schools to implement the reduction in posts, taking into account the specific curriculum priorities at each school.

Our curriculum coordinators and subject advisors are also on standby to assist schools that need additional help with reorganizing their timetable for the new year.

We are also reducing the administrative burden on schools for the coming term to give them space and time to prepare for the changes over the final term.

Public service post appointments have also been affected, and we are currently not filling posts unless a vacancy could put critical services at risk. This includes freezing the appointment of staff in Head Office and District Office posts, which are currently carrying a 21% vacancy rate.

Cutting the #BackOnTrack programme even further would have very little impact on the sheer size of the shortfall, and in doing so, we would remove revision classes for matrics, books for our Foundation Phase learners, and extra classes and teacher training for the schools hit hardest by the pandemic: those in poorer communities.

Cutting systemic testing would leave us with no objective measure of whether interventions are working, and where schools should focus their efforts to ensure that learners are meeting the required learning levels.

Moreover, even if we were to cut all the programmes named by the unions and hollow out our department to only pay educator salaries and not invest in our learners and teachers, we would not come anywhere close to closing the R3.8 billion gap.

The Western Cape has in fact prioritised and increased its investment in Education:

• Education now has the largest budget in the entire Western Cape Government.
• We have added R 6.39 billion to the Education baseline over the past three financial years.
• We have implemented the biggest learning recovery programme in the country.
• We have added 1 800 teaching posts in schools, the largest increases in a decade.
• We are building more schools faster than before through our Rapid School Build.

It is the national government’s decision to not fully fund the 2023 multi-year public sector wage agreement that has now put all of this investment at risk.

Every province is facing a fiscal emergency because of the national government’s decision.

No. The claim that alleged underspending five financial years ago has resulted in the budget deficit is false. The claim that we returned over R800 million to National Treasury is also categorically false.

The decision to only spend this money once services were actually delivered could not logically have had any impact on the current national financial crisis.

The allocation of funding to the Western Cape Safety Plan did not affect our spending on teachers at all. In fact, we’ve added over 1 800 teaching posts over the past two years.

The reason for the current shortfall in Cost of Employment budget is the decision by the national government not to fully fund the 2023 wage agreement.