Hon Speaker and members, I wish to thank and commend the Minister, on behalf of the ruling ANC, for informing this House of the developments, the vision and intentions of the department on the way to better education for all.
These are all aimed at aiding our people and at developing everyone's potential to the full, as was just stressed, and it is quite impressive, hon Minister, to note that, in fact, all political parties supported the direction taken. In fact, some of them quoted from the ANC manifesto, if you look at it.
In talking about the skills intervention and the approaches to it, I would suggest to the DA, though, that it would not be the most appropriate thing to look at a complete scrapping of the Seta, because what we are seeing is that a new department is emerging, with a Minister. The creation of an integrated approach, in fact, indicates to us that the Minister now has 12 months to review, to make proper assessments, to look at the critical gaps in the Seta formation and then to come forward with suggested approaches. Therefore, I think, we must all become involved in that debate. I also believe - as the committee we looked at it - that it was the best thing to not, in fact, reclassify for five years, because that in a sense would have tied up a new administration for five years with the existing skills setup.
Minister, we also want to suggest with regard to integration, especially at local government level, provincial government level and then with the national economic development initiatives - that the three spheres need to be closely drawn in in the strategic approaches linked to skills development. This is because what we picked up in our oversight of Giyani was that there was a mismatch between what economic opportunities there are in Giyani, the district in that environment, and the FET interventions that are there.
That brings me then to the FET colleges in particular. It's heartening to hear the concern around the perceptions of FET colleges, because there are real, negative perceptions. Last week we had a meeting with Basic Education, and between the two committees we picked up that the FET throughput was quite low. This means, from some of the studies and analysis we have done, that teachers don't necessarily understand the strength of FET colleges at times - though most of them do - but we are seeing people being sent to FET colleges that are not necessarily being sent appropriately.
So, there are perception issues at the level of teachers or educators at times, and we are asking the Minister of Higher Education and Training to work closely with the Minister of Basic Education to reflect on this.
With regard to management information systems, neither the National Student Financial Aid Scheme nor Higher Education SA currently knows where all the students that have graduated are. Also, they don't know where the unemployed students or those that did not go through the system completely are. So we have asked that question.
I think what this management information system will do is to track where unemployed graduates are or where graduates actually are beyond their studies. This is so that we do not invest significant amounts of money in education, only to support, possibly, the health sector in Canada or the engineering sector in the UK.
Therefore, the link between the patriotic responsibilities of those institutions and the type of curriculum at FET colleges, as well as the curriculum at universities, should instil patriotism, pride, dignity and all of those elements. We believe that will support the retention strategy within South Africa.
The second last point I want to make is really around the issues of performance, governance and management. We totally agree about these issues. There are obviously sections to that. The Portfolio Committee on Labour recently dealt with the annual reports. What we have seen is that most of the Setas have unqualified audits, but we do know there is public judgment when it comes, for example, to some of those deliverables.
This is precisely because the audit will look at financial auditing and not necessarily at the performance assessments and the monitoring and the impact on communities. That is an area, I believe, we will be able to reflect on over the next 12 months.
In conclusion, as the ANC we are fully behind the Minister in his commitment to ensuring that the skills revolution is taking place in our country, that we need to get all spheres of society involved in this process, and we call on all political parties - and, more importantly, all community organisations and civic organisations - to participate in this debate. I thank you. [Applause.]
Debate concluded.