Deputy Speaker, the EFF rejects this budgetary review and recommendation report. To get our education system to work, we must start at the basics. One of the most important things to be done is the institutionalisation of early childhood development, ECD, within the Department of Basic Education.
Firstly, early childhood development teachers must be permanently employed by the department, which will enable the department to also standardise the training of these teachers in the kind of syllabus that ECD teachers and centres must follow.
Secondly, the department has no way of stopping the massive drop-out rates of learners from the basic education system. More than one million pupils registered for Grade 1 in 2007 and only 512 700 or 51% of those who enrolled in 2007 wrote matric examinations in 2018. This means that over 400 000 learners were lost in the system. This is tantamount to childhood neglect by the state. We
have no way of knowing where this 400 000 young people are. We have no way of capacitating them so that they can become economically active. Chances are that these young people will never have a meaningful employment in their lives.
This is over and above the fact that South Africa has the worse quality of education system in all middle-income countries that participate in Cross- National Assessment of Educational Achievement. This department has no vision for improving basic education in this country. Therefore, once again, we reject this report. [Applause.]