Chairperson, I would like to thank hon member Beyleveldt for his question. The Deputy President's reference to the possibility of opening teacher training colleges was in response to several imperatives that need to be addressed and understood in order to improve education quality in South Africa, including the following: ensuring that the country is able to produce sufficient new teachers for all sectors of the education system; ensuring that the kinds of teachers that are produced are able to work effectively in the diverse context that characterises South African schools; and ensuring that prospective and practising teachers are more easily able to get access to teacher education institutions.
Chair, another important consideration arises out of the lack of opportunities for postschool education and training, especially in the rural areas. I will come back to this consideration later.
Our department has been working with all stakeholders, including the Department of Basic Education; all teacher unions; the SA Council for Educators; the Education, Training and Development Practices Seta; the Education Labour Relations Council, and the Higher Education South Africa Education Deans' Forum to find solutions to these problems, including considering opening new higher education institutions or colleges to educate and develop teachers.
We are pleased to say much groundwork has been done. Specifically, as the Deputy Minister of Basic Education said earlier, an Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa, 2011-25, has been jointly developed and is currently being implemented by the Minister of Higher Education and Training and the Minister of Basic Education. In line with the planning framework, the Department of Higher Education and Training is working to deal decisively with the issues that have motivated the call to open colleges of education. There are other details, Chairperson. We will send you the text, so I won't read all of it.
In line with the framework, the department is working in a logical step- wise fashion to develop the institutional capacity to ensure that the country is able to produce sufficient quality teachers for our schools by, amongst other things, ensuring the full utilisation of the campuses that currently offer teacher education programmes.
In this regard, R594 million has been allocated in 2011-12 and 2012-13 in the form of infrastructure and efficiency grants to enable the physical capacity for increased teacher education enrolments. Secondly, capacity will be extended by expanding the delivery of teacher education programmes to additional campus sites, which will be identified on the basis of an analysis of geographical region quantified need.
In other words, Chairperson, what we are envisaging is not the reopening of the old apartheid-type colleges of education. It is to increase teacher education campuses that are linked to universities in areas where there is a need. Teacher education will therefore remain a priority in the new funding cycle for infrastructure and efficiency support.
We also intend doing this by opening new institutions where it is identified that the capacity, once strengthened and extended, will still not be able to meet national and provincial needs. We also do intend, by the way, to have additional teacher education sites in the planned universities in the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga. They will need this, and I am pleased, Chairperson, particularly for you in the Chair there, that task teams have been set up to investigate the form, function and location of these institutions. The timelines for strengthening and expanding the teacher education system as described in the planning framework take us from the present to 2025. Funding currently in the system will be utilised to its maximum potential, but we are unable to provide details for this time period, as new funding will be sought through successive Bills to Treasury, something that we will be able to indicate in each financial, or Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, cycle.
The last point that I would like to briefly discuss is that, over and above this, the Department of Higher Education and Training is of the view, and it is a matter that I have raised here before in the NCOP, that the call for the reopening of teacher colleges in communities is informed by a lack of access and a lack of postschool institutions. In line with this thinking, therefore, the department is of the view that a more comprehensive strategy for access to postschool institutions needs to be sought.
This would ensure that we do not only focus on teacher education but also open different types of institutions, which should include teacher training campuses, and other types of colleges like agricultural colleges, nursing colleges, campuses for colleges for further education and training, FET, and adult basic education and training centres, as well as skills development centres. This is because sometimes the call is as a result of the fact that in the past kids in the rural areas who wanted to train postmatric or postschool would go to a teacher training college, yet the country needs more than just that. It needs a variety of institutions in the postschool education and training sector.
In closing, this approach, which was also, incidentally, endorsed by the national general council of the ruling party, is being investigated and the department will make recommendations as soon as they are available. Thank you very much, Chairperson.