Chair, respected Ministers and Deputy Minister, fellow Members of Parliament, I also want to thank in particular the Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Basic Education. I was not around for two weeks and she was able to even hold the fort in the Higher Education and Training committee. So, thank you very much, hon Chair.
Hon Ministers, we have heard of the many gains and the progress made in the area of education in the past decade and a half. I believe, however, that it is the historic task of our new Ministries of Higher Education and Training as well as Basic Education to rise up to the challenge of wiping out what remains, I believe, of the Verwoerdian legacy that sought to institutionalise the belief that there is no place for the African child in the European community. And I am raising that because we have heard, even from the opposition today, the issue around skills and the match - supply and demand - side of skills.
We do know that the realities that we are sitting with today, are precisely because of the decisions that we have taken yesteryear in South Africa. And I think that is a recognised fact and we need, therefore, to find the strategies, as we have heard from the Ministries, to articulate the positions around education further.
Amongst persons aged 20 years and older, who have completed higher education, Africans registered - and these are some of our achievements - an increase of 126,3% between 1998 and 2006. The number of university graduates who were unemployed declined between 2006 and 2007 from 229 000 to 196 000.
Despite these significant achievements, major challenges remain in the quality of education. We have not produced enough skills required for our economy and we have heard today that both Ministers speak to that.
What the committee also has indicated, and will be looking at, hon Chairperson, is the actual spend and/or reallocation when it comes to education funds through the provincial treasuries. In addition, the ANC in Polokwane called for affirmative measures for historically disadvantaged higher education institutions, with specific emphasis on infrastructure, access and staff provisioning, as well as increased accessibility to adequate water and sanitation. And I also want to indicate that a critical area for us would be around the issue of higher education, the accessibility thereof, but also the quality in relation to the support of bursaries but also what the hon member of the DA mentioned, the issue of accessibility to accommodation itself.
Comrade Ministers, we have indeed come a long way but what South Africa needs is nothing short of a skills and education revolution. With all the challenges, it is therefore just not possible to continue in a mediocre and "business as usual" way. We therefore call, in fact, for a much more radical plan, and we have heard some of the elements of that radical plan. These include, firstly, the review of the issue of FETs and the review of the issue related to Setas, as well as the alignment with higher education.
Indeed, we support that because what that brings is the alignment between higher education and the issues around those children who leave school but do not necessarily have access to university ability. And that is a very, very important one because at least 50% to 60% of our school leavers fall into that particular category.
I also want to support the hon Minister of Higher Education and Training around the question of full bursaries for those young people that enter universities from needy backgrounds. Now the bursaries are on the one side, but equally, what we have to do is to find ways of looking at those things that I call the noncurriculum side as well, namely transport issues and accommodation questions, eg if a child from Bonteheuwel or a child from a village in the Eastern Cape comes and studies at UCT, what are those cultural realities being experienced at that university?
What are the issues that a young student has to think through that the other child from Bishopscourt does not necessarily have to think through? Those are the real dynamics. And what we have seen at some stage in the previous portfolio, in a particular programme, is that if we look at the issues of the nonacademic questions linked up with a full bursary, we in fact have seen a pass rate of at least 75% to 80% in engineering students. Therefore, it is critically important that we look at those types of issues.
We also welcome, as the committee, the report produced on transformation and social cohesion and we agree with the monitoring mechanisms that hon Minister Nzimande has put in place around that.
There are, however, two issues that I just want to highlight in the report, in a sense as additions. The one is the question around the compulsory staff development of academics. I do think that we need to push very hard on higher education and research, but equally, so the issue of quality teaching and staff development in terms of that in itself - for educators - becomes important for us.
The other issue is related to the preliminary research that indicates that only a third of first-year enrolments graduate in the minimum time. Therefore, the question is the third and fourth-year debate and I know that the department is analysing that issue and we welcome the findings of that discussion.
With regard to governance, the report, hon Ministers, also mentions the institutional forums and composition of councils that should be reviewed in order to make them more effective in giving voice to the various stakeholders.
However, that report is therefore a submission which I believe we need to somehow reflect on. In my view, it's possibly not speaking too much about the workers on campus when it comes to higher education and colleges. I know that, not so long ago, Nehawu in fact raised that particular issue on 13 May 2009, when they issued a very strongly worded call for some moratorium on the outsourcing and the labour brokers at institutions of higher learning.
Essentially, the workers, just before some of that outsourcing, had a relationship with the institutions. Now somehow we see it is much more than just a particular service as a labour broker, and that is something that I believe the report was not necessarily clear on.
Hon Chairperson, I have focused on what existing higher education institutions can do to address the skills and unemployment crisis. However, the message that the Minister has given about the post-school system, and therefore the further education sector, as well as the programmes around the apprenticeships, is something that we, as a committee, also support.
I do, however, want to request that the National Youth Development Agency be brought, not indirectly, but very directly into that programme. Because if we say that at least 50%-plus of young people who in fact have left school are unemployed and not necessarily appropriately skilled, the question is: Who are they? Where are they? So that we do not speak about percentages. We need to be able to say, this is currently the ability they have; this is where they are working or that they are unemployed; this is the casual labour work that they have done in the past; or this is the level of skills development that they have gone through. So we need, not a tracking device, but a proper database analysis of them and therefore, as our committee, we also support them. [Time expired.] [Applause.]