Hon Chairperson, hon Minister of Basic Education, provincial MECs, hon members, ladies and gentlemen, I want to take this opportunity to welcome the presentation by the Minister and her forthright and candid assessment of our education system.
It is indeed true that significant strides have been made in taking our education system forward in terms of the overall quality of our curriculum, the number of learners benefiting through poverty-alleviation interventions in the form of no-fee schools, the National Schools Nutrition Programme, the mainstreaming of early childhood development centres and many other flagship programmes that make up the department.
In line with the Polokwane resolutions and the manifesto of the ruling party, we have declared quintile 3 schools no-fee schools, thus increasing the number of learners benefiting from this policy from 1,2 million to 1,657 million, which now constitutes 81,67% of the overall number of learners in the province. This is well above the 60% that is stipulated in the manifesto of the ruling party.
One hundred and eighty-three quintile 1 high schools covering 174 105 learners are benefiting from the school nutrition programme in the current financial year. The budget for early childhood development has increased from R270 million in the 2008-09 financial year to R367,31 million in the 2009-10 financial year. This will cover the pre-Grade R stipends for practitioners, the training of pre-Grade R and Grade R practitioners, and the resourcing of the foundation phase, including the 91 early childhood development facilities that we are constructing. We have also seen an increase in enrolment in Grade R from 132 599 in 2008 to 141 181 in 2009.
More than anything, though, I welcome your forceful articulation, hon Minister, of the maladies that continue to blight our schooling system. The time for shifting blame and refusing to acknowledge challenges and personal shortcomings is over.
Coming from the Eastern Cape, I would go further and acknowledge that the combative relations with worker unions have also had a significant role in the perennial underperformance of our learners and schools, in particular at the point of exit from the system, which is Grade 12.
In responding to these challenges, we are thus enjoined to find common platforms that will instead focus our energies towards the improvement and acceleration of transformation at all key levels of the system. A lot of ground has been covered in mending relations with our social partners through the resuscitation of the provincial education labour relations council, which creates the platform to address matters of common and mutual interest. And we have also engaged in relationship-building exercises with our unions to ensure that we work together in ensuring that we deliver quality education in the province.
The introduction of the new curriculum statement for Grade 12 last year has not been without challenges in our province. We have had to acknowledge that critical knowledge gaps were experienced by some of our teachers, and that maybe the training we provided was not adequate. We have thus endeavoured to intensify training in addition to providing planning, co- ordination, monitoring, evaluation and support for the implementation of the National Curriculum Statement from Grade R up to Grade 12. We shall continue with the training on the National Curriculum Statement we started towards the end of last year, during which time we covered about 2 400 educators in the general education and training band, and also about 4 000 at the beginning of 2009 in the further education and training band.
To reduce the administrative burden on educators and to ensure quality and uniformity, we have developed lesson plans for all learning areas and for all grades, and these are being distributed as we speak. The department is busy developing the lesson plans for the third and fourth quarters. We hope that by September 2009 the process will have been completed and that all lesson plans will have been distributed to our schools. We hope and trust that this will translate into increased confidence in the classroom by our educators and lead to better education outcomes, as well as to a reduction in the dropout and repetition rates and to an improved promotion rate.
I further wish to concur with the hon Minister that indeed the systematic and historical disparities continue to have a major role in the quality of our educational outputs. The majority of our people in the Eastern Cape reside in the rural areas, which continue to be a hotbed of rabid and unacceptable levels of inequality. With over 800 mud and unsafe schools due for eradication, we are in full agreement with the sentiments expressed in the Minister's speech on rural schools. This resonates with our own challenges of underdevelopment emanating from the failed homelands project.
We certainly agree that better co-ordination between departments will help to fast-track our interventions in this regard. Indeed, the political will that is displayed by the leadership of government towards the 2010 infrastructure should be adopted to deal with the infrastructure backlogs in the education sector. If we can adopt the attitude we have adopted towards the 2010 infrastructure, we will be able to cover a lot of ground in eradicating the infrastructure backlogs in the sector.
Our own commitment to rural development is demonstrated by our stated endeavour to undertake key infrastructure development in the rural areas, even to the extent of building expensive full-service model schools in the rural areas. Out of the 316 schools that are currently under construction as we speak - straddled over two financial years - the majority of those, that is 258 schools, will be finalised in this current financial year. The majority of them are in the rural areas, including the 12 model schools we have started that are allocated in both rural areas and townships.
In terms of the provision of resources, proper planning and co-ordination have ensured that for the first time in a while the Eastern Cape was able to significantly improve the delivery of learner and teacher-support material ahead of the resumption of schooling for the 2009 academic year. This has definitely helped in boosting the morale of our learners and educators, in that the call - and the insistence - that teaching and learning resume on the very first day of the school year has indeed been heeded by the majority of schools. This has enabled the department to implement its learner-attainment improvement strategy, which is meant to create a conducive environment for teaching and learning from the beginning of the year, thus ensuring that all targeted areas of improvement are given adequate time.
In conclusion, the Eastern Cape has heeded the call to arms in the form of the Quality Learning and Teaching Campaign. Besides the provincial launch at Cofimvaba on 2 April 2009, all our 23 districts are falling over each other as they mainstream this campaign through their own unit launches.
The East London district launch in May 2009 brought together all the critical components in the campaign, including parents, teachers, civil organisations, representatives of school governing bodies, learners and office-based educators from the district office. The mood and the spirit suggested to me that there was a growing consensus that the turnaround of our education system was indeed everybody's business.
Our experience also shows that there is a correlation between poor performance and dysfunctionality in our schools on the one hand and poor leadership in schools on the other. In this regard, we are continuing with the training of the circuit managers on coaching and mentoring in order to assist and support principals and school management teams in improving the management and governance of our schools. Secondly, we are also going to train 2 490 principals in leadership and management of schools. With this intervention we are confident that our schools will become centres of excellence.
We are also committed to being the torch-bearers of the message that has been given and provided by the hon Minister of hard work and resilience, fully aware that education remains the fundamental tool in the transformation agenda of our government. With those few words, I support the Budget Vote. [Applause.]