Chairperson, hon Ministers, Deputy Ministers, hon members of the House, firstly let me take this opportunity to congratulate the Minister on the bold and courageous initiatives that she introduced as part of her 2010 Budget Vote speech. For us, it resonates with our acceptance of the challenges that have been presented to us by the myriad gaps that require departmental astuteness, commitment and renewed zeal to contribute meaningfully to our province's desire and dire needs. It is indeed high time that all of us take responsibility for providing meaningful solutions and interventions to our own generic and site-specific challenges that continue to deter our capacity to provide quality teaching and learning for all our schools, in particular the perennial underperforming township and rural schools.
As the Eastern Cape we are committed to realising the required systematic overhaul that will enable us to source all the necessary support from education stakeholders. For us the commitment has been concretised in the form of the upgrading learner attainment improvement strategy that has been fashioned this year into a master plan for total learner performance and school management improvement. The plan mainly focuses on strengthening governance and management, improving the content knowledge gaps of educators through education learnerships and providing basic school resources.
It is the province's intention to continue to emphasise and strengthen the resolve reflected by both the President and the Minister that our stakeholders have an added responsibility to fully partner with the department in the realisation of its comprehensive refocusing on the delivery of quality teaching and learning. As provincial education, the executing authority will personally take charge of the implementation of this instruction through a co-ordinated programme of launches and the introduction of the Quality Learning and Teaching Campaign throughout the province in all 23 districts, with massive events that are attracting all the various layers of education stakeholders.
In pursuit of the realisation of maths and science targets, the department has established a maths and science academy that will spearhead the strengthening of teacher training and resources for successfully improved teaching of maths and science. Furthermore, our training regime for this academic year includes 494 maths and science teachers from underperforming schools being trained in content gaps; 50 science teachers enrolled for the advanced certificate; and 276 maths teachers enrolled for the advanced certificate.
The province is still on course to ensure that we meet the target to provide all our primary schools with Grade R classes. Over the last three financial years we have substantially increased fiscal allocation for Grade R and that has resulted in a marked increment in the number of children accessing these key facilities. We achieved this with a significant improvement in the remuneration and skills level of our ECD practitioners.
As a province we welcome the honesty and candour behind the delivery changes being gradually introduced in the mechanism of curriculum delivery. The feedback from our educators actually does attest to relief and acceptance of the initiatives by all sections of our educator corps. In this regard the province is also at an advanced stage in the delivery of a training regime for all managers and school management teams of underperforming schools in the province. We are also midstream in our advanced workshop for principals and their deputies of the 494 identified underperforming high schools. In the next term our focus will shift to the 2 500 feeder schools whose limitations have also been identified as a significant factor in continued subprime performance.
In conclusion, the province fully supports any initiative that will result in an accelerated assault on the infrastructure backlog, which remains a significant marker of underdevelopment in our largely rural province made up of former homelands. The scourge of mud and unsafe schools remains the single most visible morale dampener to our post-independence education project. Indeed, the road towards the attainment of people's education and people's power is always under construction. I thank you. [Applause.]