Financing Vocational Education and Training in South Africa

Participation in education in South Africa is high. In 2004, around one-third of all South Africans were enrolled in some form of educational institution on a full-time basis. However, only around 2% of those enrolled were enrolled in an institution other than a school or a tertiary institution (Statistics South Africa, 2005). This is to some extent the concern of this chapter. Poor quality in education and training is perceived as a problem. The starkest manifestation of this in recent years is probably the very poor performance of South Africa in the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests in 2003. Skills shortages exist in a variety of fields, but are particularly acute in the engineering, computer-related, education and nursing fields. At the same time, the unemployment rate amongst the unskilled is particularly high. The official unemployment rate for 2005 was 27%. High unemployment rates have been a feature of the South African economy since at least the 1970s. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, various indicators have improved. Certain improvements can only be expected to have a wider impact in the medium to long term. On the education supply side, total public spending on education and training has risen in real terms, though as a proportion of GDP it has dropped. Public expenditure on each African school pupil doubled in real terms between 1994 and 2005. The post-apartheid period has seen the emergence of an entirely new set of institutions, policies and quality interventions, all explicitly geared towards undoing the apartheid human resources legacy. Those relating to pre-tertiary vocational education and training are discussed below. On the labour demand side, a set of employment equity rules has been established to counteract the racial and gender discrimination entrenched over many years in the South African workplace. Economic growth, 4.5% in 2004, is higher than it has been for twenty years. Whilst the growth experienced is arguably not of the jobless growth variety, a parallel growth in the demand for jobs means that a decisive and satisfactory decline in the unemployment rate has not been realised yet. The spending breakdown for education and training is shown in Table 1 for 2005. This chapter deals with South Africa’s spending policies in relation to the two lines in Table 1 that deal with vocational education and training at (mainly) the