N Pandor: South Africa Ireland Education Conference

15 November 2006

Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa
Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister for Education and Science of the Republic of
Ireland
Minister Radebe and Deputy Ministers from South Africa
Your Excellency, Ambassador Jana
Member of the Judiciary
Vice Chancellors and Presidents of Universities
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen

We face a range of difficult, deep and daunting education challenges in
South Africa.

The skills shortages facing the country cannot be resolved overnight. The
South African government has been putting the essential building blocks in
place to ensure that we meet our national developmental needs.

Our first challenge is to improve the quality of education in all our
schools. This is a huge task. The majority of our schools were systematically
disadvantaged under apartheid. They were deprived of resources, facilities and
qualified teachers. Today, despite one of the most significant examples in
recent history of the redistribution of state funding from rich to poor
schools, those schools that were advantaged under apartheid still tend to
perform substantially better than all other schools.

The second challenge is to encourage school leavers to consider training in
our Further Education and Training (FET) colleges. Currently we have far too
few students in this sector, only about 400 000. We have recently piloted a
Bill through parliament to give these colleges a new lease of life and I will
say a little more about them later.

Our third challenge is to ensure the success of students who attend our
universities and universities of technology. The number of graduates from these
institutions has more than doubled over the last decade, which is encouraging.
We have currently about 750 000 headcount students in this sector, the majority
at universities.

However, the actual success rate is not what it should be. We are not
producing enough graduates in key skill areas. Recent cohort analyses have
revealed startling gaps in some faculties at some universities.

The fourth challenge is to make the national skills development strategy
(the industrial training programme) work more effectively to support a more
competitive business sector and a more efficient state.

Overall the broad challenge is to prepare young people for work more
effectively.

All countries currently face the demand for more literate and numerate
school leavers than ever before. All of us have been redesigning curricula to
suit a world that is reinventing itself rapidly through new technologies. In
South Africa our democratic government faced a particular challenge in this
regard; black children in the pre-1994 era were not thought suited to learning
Mathematics and Science.

So we have resolved to pursue quality Maths and Science education for all
but to supplement this general aim through a focus-school approach to the
learning of Maths and Science.

The first building block in our skills revolution is the Maths and Science
focus-school. We began these focus schools, these Dinaledi schools, in 2001 and
they met with mixed success. We revamped the scheme recently, expanded their
number, set ourselves new goals, and designed a co-ordinated set of
specifications (textbooks, laboratories, and teachers) to draw in the
assistance of business.

Without Maths, school leavers cannot go on to succeed in a variety of
post-school institutions, in technical and related fields.

The second building block is the further education and training college.

We are in the process of recapitalising our FET colleges. We have been
assisted by the National Business Initiative in this process over the past five
years. There is a national shortage of skilled and semi-skilled workers. This
shortage has serious consequences for our ability to complete large-scale
projects like the Gautrain, and preparing to host the 2010 Soccer World
Cup.

About 400 000 students attend FET colleges and 750 000 attend higher
education institutions. Given our human resources requirements, and the
direction of economic growth in South Africa, the numbers should be the other
way round. The number of students should be higher in the colleges.

Only last month we passed a Bill in Parliament that effectively established
colleges as separate institutions from schools. Strange to relate, our FET
colleges are part of our school system and this prevents adults from
participating in programmes.

This Bill provides the framework to strengthen responsiveness, co-ordination
and quality. We have recapitalised and redesigned the college sector. From next
year they will be able to offer intermediate and high-level skills to students
from the age of 16 to mature adults. They will be able to give effect to our
long held idea of providing lifelong learning. All indicators of economic
growth and development point to the fact that we must have more artisans in all
the economic sectors in our country. We believe colleges are best placed to
teach these skills alongside industry and other partners.

The third building block is the University of Technology. Universities of
technology are a major national asset. Students do not need a university
exemption to register. In fact, technology universities offer an alternative
entry into higher education for students who would otherwise have been excluded
on academic grounds from the university sector.

Technology universities offer national diploma and certificate programmes at
level five of our National Qualifications Framework (NQF). And employers,
parents and students see technology universities as institutions guaranteeing
greater employment prospects than universities.

We are short of business and financial managers. We are short of men and
women with engineering skills. We are short of men and women with Information
Technology (IT) skills. All recent studies and surveys confirm what we already
know about scarce skills; management, engineering, and IT are key areas of
shortage.

Technology universities have a fundamental role to play in this respect.
During the decade of freedom there have been fundamental changes in
occupational structure, in qualifications, and in skills required in different
economic sectors. However, the overall pattern is for up-skilling or an
increase in "skill intensity," especially in managerial, professional, and
associate professional occupations.

In addition, there is an increasing need for job specific, technical skill,
which is paralleled by an increased demand for skill types that cut across
sectors and occupations, including basic skills, generic skill (including
verbal, numerical, planning and communication skills), IT skills and management
skills.

Technology universities have made a phenomenal contribution to the growth of
human capital in South Africa. This is evident through the massive expansion in
enrolment in the recent past and the massive improvement in the qualification
profile of graduates.

We want to expand career-oriented education. The market requires that
graduates increasingly master technical competencies and have practical
work-based experience. Perhaps Ireland could help assess our institutional
readiness to bridge the skills gap.

The fourth building block is the university. Universities train
professionals like lawyers, engineers, and doctors. They are also places of
research into the fundamental principles of science.

Our universities have always jealously guarded academic freedom and some of
them have a tradition of rejecting state direction or control. Ten years ago
the University of Cape Town (UCT), one of our leading universities, did not
even have a research policy. The University of Cape Town had an implicit policy
that was focused on peer review articles in journals.

The much respected, late, former Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research, John
Martin, writing in 1997, said that within the space of a few years, and the
publication of a white paper on research, all that had changed.

"The universities, and other research institutions, will be increasingly
judged by national and local government, by community organisations and by
industry (who are collectively the funders of research) on the contribution
they make to the social and economic problems currently facing the country."
This was quite an about turn.

UCT set about formulating an explicit research policy. And this is what John
Martin said lay at its core, "In formulating the university's position, an
understanding of the role of research in the university is essential. I believe
it to be part of teaching and learning, in that successful research influences
the thinking of researchers, scholars and practitioners both nationally and
internationally, and in that it stretches the mind of those engaged in it. It
is also inextricably linked to capacity development and to adding value to
students, staff and other participants."

Recently we allocated a certain amount of money over and above our subsidy
to universities to increase the number of engineering graduates. And the
response from the universities was fast, engaged and responsive. I have been
told by university vice chancellors that our Accelerated and Shared Growth
Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA) and Joint Initiative for Priority Skills
Acquisition (JIPSA) initiative have concentrated university minds. It has had
an important impact on research universities, which now know they have a
crucial role to play in the provision of skills.

The fifth building block in the skills revolution is the national skills
programme itself. Government has played a leading role in aligning the skills
supply of the education and training sector with the demands of the economy,
that is, the skills needs of the private sector, state operated enterprises and
government.

To focus and facilitate this process the Joint Council on Priority Skills
Acquisition, which includes government, business and labour leaders, has been
established. JIPSA serves as a central clearing house for discussion on skills
needs and strategy development.

I will leave it up to the Deputy President to tell us more about the
initiative when she addresses us later on in the proceedings.

Thank you.

Issued by: Department of Education
15 November 2006