Chairperson, Minister of Basic Education, hon members of the NCOP, Director-General of Basic Education and honoured guests, thank you for the opportunity to address the NCOP as we debate the Basic Education Budget Vote. The Western Cape warmly welcomes Minister Motshekga's continued emphasis on a delivery-driven basic education system. We are particularly pleased with her efforts to increase the provision of workbooks and learner support materials in the classroom, and her support for the President's call for an undivided focus on the Triple T: teachers, textbooks and time.
This echoes Premier Helen Zille's often-repeated mantra of "time on task". Based on this principle, we are doing everything possible to protect teaching and learning time in the Western Cape to ensure that learners are in class seven hours a day, five days a week and 200 days a year.
We also welcome the Minister's commitment to increase and improve educator and principal training courses and we are very supportive of her intention to deliver on the objective of providing a textbook for every learner in every subject.
While we are pleased with and will support a number of these intended deliverables, in the Western Cape we have already gone way beyond talking about delivery and have already begun to deliver. For instance, in March this year I also announced our intention to ensure that over the next three years every child from Grades 1 to 12 will have a textbook in every subject that he or she is taking. We are already delivering on this.
In the current and last financial year, we have gone beyond the national norm for textbook allocation by allocating an additional R230 million for the purchase of textbooks throughout the system. For the first time ever, learners in Grade 2 received a mathematics textbook and reading books have been distributed to selected schools for Grades 1 to 6.
The Western Cape education department, WCED, has also delivered life sciences textbooks to every Grade 12 learner taking the subject in 2011, and textbook orders in other subjects to the value of R6,5 million were placed and delivered early this year for any shortages in Grades 10 to 12. In literacy and numeracy, the Western Cape continues to lead the rest of the country in the use of extensive testing for learners.
Last year we expanded our provincial lit-num testing programme by testing over 247 000 learners. We tested both Grades 3 and 6 learners in the same year instead of in alternate years, and introduced Grade 9 learners and independent schools to the programme for the very first time.
It is clear from the Minister's speech that there are concerns about underexpenditure on capital payments on the one hand, and overexpenditure on personnel on the other. In stark contrast, the Western Cape has spent all of its budget allocation on infrastructure and other capital projects and managed the impact of the salary increases through effective cost savings. We are particularly pleased with the progress we have made in the delivery on our infrastructure plan. In just one year, we have delivered over 171 additional mobile units to overcrowded schools and have built an extra 112 classrooms to increase access to quality schools.
This year we have already opened five new schools, including Claremont High School, our third Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, or Stem, school. Eight schools are currently under construction, with a further 15 in their planning stages. Fifteen replacement schools are also in their planning stages, with four schools expected to be completed this year.
We are also very proud of how we have delivered on our commitment to improve the department's business processes and systems in order to ensure rapid response and support to schools. We have complete faith in our quality schools and have developed a "call us if in need" approach to allow them to function without interference and, in turn, free up our district officials to concentrate on struggling schools.
We also know how important it is for principals and school governing bodies, SGBs, to have the highest degree of staff stability possible. To this end, we have dramatically improved the processes by which we advertise and fill vacancies in our schools.
In 2010 we published seven vacancy lists, as opposed to the two lists in earlier years. By improving the turnaround times in the appointment process, we are ensuring that much-needed greater stability of schools. We agree with Minister Motshekga's view that in order to fully realise the rights of all learners to quality education we need to improve teacher subject knowledge and pedagogical practice. The Western Cape has therefore streamlined our educator training and development programmes, so that they are more focused, with compulsory training for teachers at underperforming schools and far greater choice for teachers at high performing schools.
In March this year the Minister launched the National Education Evaluation and Development Unit. While we fully support her commitment to evaluate performance in the system and to identify problems that undermine school improvement, we are also of the belief that accountability for performance begins at the top. To this end, the head of department and I signed performance contracts early last year with the premier, which directly link our actions to improving learner outcomes in line with our strategic plan.
Last year we also passed the Western Cape Provincial School Education Amendment Act, which will enable me as Education minister in the Western Cape to develop regulations with regard to performance agreements between the head of department, principals and deputy principals. These performance contracts will ultimately link performance assessment to the quality of learner outcomes at a given school.
The Minister herself recently announced her intention to deliver new performance evaluations for principals to ensure that schools deliver academic results. These are just some of the deliverables we have achieved in the last year and it is significant that we have laid the foundations for the implementation of our strategic plan.
In 2011 we will continue to work hard to build on these foundations with our main objective in mind, i.e. to improve the quality of education in the Western Cape. Ultimately, all of us in education have, as a goal, the provision of quality education to all our young learners. But it is the delivery of these objectives that will determine our success. Thank you. [Applause.]