We agree with the Council for Higher Education in their correctly observing that the apartheid government generated a historical geography of higher education that resulted in an excessive concentration of institutions and provisioning in certain areas of the country, and an absence of readily accessible contact provision in other areas. We think the efforts to open 12 campuses will improve access to education for our people and ensure that we realise the hopes of a strong economy and also a strong base of workers.
Two weeks ago Woolworths in the Western Cape, in partnership with the Wholesale and Retail Seta, launched a project to familiarise lecturers in the public FET colleges in the Western Cape with the retail industry. We would like to applaud these efforts and urge other Setas, together with sector partners, to follow suit, in line with the National Skills Accord, which was entered into by the partners.
It will be remiss of me if I do not reflect on the concerns about the Seta grant regulations. The Seta grant regulations are intended to direct the spending of levy resources to resolve challenges around the youth that are not in education, employment or any training, and aim to ensure effective and efficient utilisation of skills development funding and surpluses or reserves thereof. The regulations are also aimed at ensuring that the bulk of the funding goes to critical and scarce skills required to improve the skills base of our country, and ultimately improve the growth of our economy. We know that there are concerns amongst service providers that used to be beneficiaries of some indefinable programmes offered by Setas in the past. The situation where 95% of skills funds were spent on private providers was wrong. There has to be a better balance, with FET colleges and universities playing a significant role.
The Department of Higher Education and Training must ensure that the Setas are no longer treated as ATMs or a predictable lottery. We are, however, not going back on our commitment to realising the objectives of the National Skills Development Strategy III and supporting the regulations that have been announced, in order to actualise our end state. This is a long-term process of reform that is in the interests of employers, industry and the economy, and the ANC is determined to see that these reforms are carried through in order to achieve the impact that we require to build a strong economy in our country. Our FET colleges have raised concerns regarding the issuing of certificates to FET graduates. We would like to urge the Minister to ensure a response that gives clarity on this matter and also to increase the pace of efforts to bring finality to the issuing of certificates. We think this issue is also compounded by leakage of question papers in some of the FET colleges during examinations, which causes the courses that are affected to be pending in the entire system. We ought to look at this urgently.
We take this opportunity as the ANC to affirm our commitment to realising our objective of free education and ensuring that we build a single, coherent and highly educative system. Thank you, Chairperson. [Applause.]