-15404 e. Icq5- Public Disclosure Authorized
DISCUSSIONPAPER
SouthAfrica
Public Disclosure Authorized EducationSector StrategicIssues and PolicyOptions Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized
THE WORLDBANK INFORMALDISCUSSION PAPERS SOUTHERNAFRICA ON ASPECTSOF THE DEPARTMENT ECONOMYOF SOUTHAFRICA PREVIOUS WORLD BANK PAPERS ON SOUTH AFRICA
Previouslypublished in the World Bank series of informaldiscussion papers on South Africa:
Levy,B. January 1992."How Can SouthAfrican ManufacturingEfficiently Create Employment?An Analysisof the Impactof Trade and IndustrialPolicy".
Kahn, B., Abdel,S. and Walton, M. May 1992."South Africa: MacroeconomicIssues for the Transition".
Fallon,P. October 1992."An Analysisof Employmentand Wage Behaviorin South Africa".
SouthernAfrica Department,May 1993."An EconomicPerspective of SouthAfrica".
Belli, P., Finger,F., Ballivian A., August 1993."South Africa: A Reviewof Trade Policies".
Riley,T., November1993. "Characteristics of and ConstraintsFacing Black Businesses in SouthAfrica: Survey Results".
SouthernAfrica Department,February 1994. "South African Agriculture: Structure, Performanceand Optionsfor the Future".
Fallon,P., Pereirada Silva, L., April 1994."South Africa: EconomicPerformance and Policies".
SouthernAfrica Department,April 1994."South Africa: Financingthe Metropolitan Areas of SouthAfrica".
SouthernAfrica Department,June 1994."Reducing Poverty in SouthAfrica".
SouthernAfrica Department,December 1995. "Natural ResourceIssues in EnvironmentalPolicy".
In addition,a numberof technicaland seminarpapers preparedby World Bank staff and SouthAfrican counterpartsin key sectors have been discussedin the country. FOREWORD
This review of key educational issues and policy options is published by the World Bank as part of its informal series of Discussion Papers on various aspects of the South African economy. Comments on working drafts were provided by the National Department of Education and sector colleagues in South Africa.
The paper brings together the findings of a broad range of education sector studies commissioned by the World Bank in South Africa over the past three years, all of which were prepared in collaboration or consultation with the ANC Education Department. This material is integrated with findings that World Bank staff have drawn from extensive discussion with students, teachers, educational administrators, as well as with policymakers, researchers and representatives of educational NGOs across South Africa. The paper also summarizes salient lessons of international experience that have helped to guide the Bank's approach in South Africa.
The paper highlights the conclusion supported by educational development experience in other countries that public financial support for general primary and secondary schooling is both the most equitable and the most cost-effective investment that governments can make. Within this framework, and in light of clear budget constraints, the paper identifies three areas that merit priority attention: expanding access, improving instructional quality, and strengthening sector planning and management capacity. It also underlines the critical importance of establishing a clear relationship between the national and provincial departments of education in order to resolve pressing education sector problems.
Southern Africa Department The World Bank December 1995
Copyright© 1995 The WorldBank 1818 H Street,N.W. Washington,D.C. 20433,U.S.A.
This is an informalstudy by WorldBank staff,published for discussionpurposes. It is not an officialWorld Bank document.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This report was prepared by a team comprised of Janet L. Leno (task manager), Keith Hansen and Dzingai Mutumbuka. External review was provided by Dr. Jonathan Jansen, who commented extensively on earlier drafts. Valuable comments were also made by Nicholas Bennett, Roger Grawe, Helena Ribe, Ward Heneveld and Luiz Pereira da Silva. The team expresses its appreciation to the many South Africans and others who participated in the background studies that informed this report, and to the numerous public officials and NGO representatives who shared their time and their thinking with the World Bank team over the past three years.
CURRENCY EQUIVALENTS
1995:
1 Rand = 0.27 US$ I US$ = 3.65 Rands
LIST OF ACRONYMS AND INITIALS
ANC African National Congress DBSA Development Bank of Southern Africa DET Department of Education and Training ECD Early Childhood Development GDP Gross Domestic Product GNP Gross National Product HOA House of Assembly HOD House of Delegates HOR House of Representatives IDT Independent Development Trust IQ Intelligence Quotient LSD Living Standards and Development Survey NGO Non-Governmental Organisation OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development PEM Protein-Energy Malnutrition RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme RIEP Research Institute for Education Planning SACMEQ Southern Africa Consortium to Measure Educational Quality SGTs Self-Governing Territories TBVC Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei UNICEF United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ...... I
A. Legacy of Apartheid ...... 2...... 2 B. Goals for the Future ...... 3...... 3
II. INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE...... 5
A. Primary and Secondary Education ...... 5 B. Vocational Skills Training ...... 6...... 6 C. Tertiary Education ...... 9...... 9
III. CONSIDERATIONS FOR PUBLIC POLICY...... 9
A. The Education Budget ...... 0 B. Suggested Areas for Future Public Investment ...... 13
1. Expand Access to Primary and Secondary Education ...... 14 Magnitude of the Problem...... 14 Indicative Costs of Responding to the Problem ...... 15 Options to Reduce Costs ...... 15
2. Improve Instructional Quality ...... 17 The Problem ...... 17 Sources of the Problem ...... 18 Approaches to Improve Instructional Quality...... 21 Potential to Reduce Costs ...... 24
3. Strengthen Sector Planning and Management Capacity ...... 25 The Problem ...... 25 Proposals to Fill the Gaps ...... 28 Indicative Costs ...... 29
IV. AREAS FOR PUBLIC/PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS ...... 29
A. Early Childhood Development ...... 30 B. Skills Upgrading ...... 31 C. Tertiary Education ...... 32
V. A PREREQUISITE FOR ACTION -- INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS ...... 33 Annexes
I The Former South African Governance System (Pre-Election) II Share of Total Recurrent Expenditure by Program (%) III Share of Total Recurrent Expenditure by Race (%) IV Per Capita Recurrent Expenditure on Primary Education by Race, Department and Year (Rands) V Per Capita Recurrent Expenditure on African Primary Education by Department and Year (Rands) VI Primary Per Capita Expenditure in HoA Compared to Other Departments 1987/8 and 1991/2 (Rands) South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
I. INTRODUCTION AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper presents a discussion of the strategic education sector issues and policy options that the World Bank believes to be at the heart of efforts to expand and strengthen school education provision for all South Africans. The general focus on school education reflects the area in which the Bank was requested to work by the ANC Education Department between 1992 and 1994. 1It is for this reason that issues related to primary and secondary education receive the lion's share of attention and that other sub-sectors (notably, Adult Basic Education and Training) are not dealt with. Similarly, the paper touches only briefly on certain key educational issues (such as language policy and curriculum reform) that the Bank believes play an important role in the learning outcomes of South African pupils, but which fall outside the requested scone of work.
The paper has been written for two reasons. First, it is a means to share with colleagues and management within the World Bank our current thinking regarding education in South Africa. Second, we hope that the paper will contribute to the rich policy discussion ongoing within the country, and thus will be useful to the Government of National Unity as it addresses a wide range of challenges in the education and training sector.
This document is divided into five sections. The remainder of Section I presents a brief summary of the legacy of apartheid in the education and training sector, laying out in broad terms the range of challenges that currently confront the sector as a result of historical race- and class-based separation and discrimination. Section II steps back from the South African context to review international experience with investment in education and training. Lessons from other countries lead to the conclusion that public financial support for general primary and secondary schooling is both the most equitable and thte most cost-effective investment governments can make in this sector. Section III begins by discussing main issues and trends in South Africa's public expenditure on education, highlighting continued racial inequities and the urgent need to control the growth of teacher salaries. It then examines what we believe to be the most critical problems facing school education in South Africa -- inequitable educational access, weak instructional quality, and insufficient planning and management capacity -- and proposes some policy options and programmatic approaches that could help address these problems. Where data
I The followingconsultancy reports were commissionedby the WorldBank. Althoughthe publicationdates of some are no longerrecent, we believe the essenceof the findingsremains valid.
PublicExpenditure on Educationin South Africa. 1987/88-1991/2,P. Bucklandand J. Fielden with 1. Adams,M. Bot, A. Donaldson,B. Langa,N. Magau,C. Simkins,B. Soobrayan. Publishedjointly with the Centrefor EducationPolicy Development, Johannesburg (August 1994) Early ChildhoodDevelopment, R. Padayachie,E. Atmore,L. Biersteker,R. King, J. Matube,S. Muthayan,K. Naidoo,D. Plaatjieswith J. Evans (Consultant). Publishedjointly with the Centre for EducationPolicy Development (August 1994) EducationPlanning and SystemsManagement: An Appraisalof Needs in SouthAfrica, R. Fehnel (Consultant)with R. Bergmann,P. Buckland,J. Jansen,M. Metcalf, and Z. Senkane(April 1993) Approachesto the Constructionof SchoolInfrastructure in South Africa, D. Taylor and J.P. Smoor (October1992)
Page I South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options have been available, some indicative cost implications are also presented. Section IV discusses briefly three areas that we believe could be expanded and strengthened through partnerships between the public sector on the one hand, and households and the private sector on the other. Section V concludes by underscoring the importance of establishing a clear relationship between the national and provincial departments of education so that key sectoral problems can be resolved.
A. LEGACY OF APARTHEID AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR ACTION
Despite the fact that South Africa is considered to be an upper middle-income country, it has the educational profile of a low-income economy: low academic survival rates for primary school students, high rates of repetition, and poor learning outcomes for those who do reach secondary. These characteristics should not be surprising, given that under apartheid the education of blacks was not merely one among many neglected social sectors. The policies of "Bantu education " in particular were designed e-xpresslyto thwart the intellectual development of African children and thus prepare them for only the most menial physical jobs to which the system consigned themL At the same time a broader legislative agenda was put in place to undermine the educational opportunities of all black South Africans.
The legacy of apartheid policy in education and training is manifold and today is reflected at three broad levels. First, the poor quality of the education offered to blacks had profound implications for formal schooling, which impacts the majority of the population. Second, it is responsible for the relatively low skills level of the current labor force. And third, apartheid's legacy is visible at the level of the country's technical, professional and managerial skills base, where black South Africans are glaringly underrepresented. The effects of apartheid at each of these levels are discussed briefly below.
Neglect of Fomal Schooling for the MAjorityof the Population. For most black children and youth who have managed to enter formal schooling, apartheid has meant a second-rate education. Underinvestment in facilities and maintenance has led to severe overcrowding, especially in African schools.3 African teachers in particular have been poorly educated and inadequately trained, so the quality of instruction they are able to offer their pupils is often low. Operating budgets in many African departments have been scarce, and materials are frequently undersupplied and outdated. And across the board, education sector management and planning have not been accorded priority, resulting in inefficient use of resources and little accountability. Moreover, certain educational policies -- such as the requirement that all children master English and Afrikaans, as well as their initial language of instruction (which is often different from the mother tongue) -- have posed serious hurdles for black pupils.
2 In this paper the term "black" refersto all historically-disadvantagedgroups under the former apartheid structure. Referenceto other race-inspiredterms has been necessarybecause the apartheidgovernment providedpublic services-- includingeducation and training-- alongthese lines. Such distinctionsare used solely for the purposeof highlightinghistoric inequality. In this contextthen the term "African"refers to black Africans;"coloured" refers to persons of mixedrace; "Indian"means persons of Indian sub-continent descent;and "white"refers to Caucasiansof Europeandescent.
3 Prior to the April 1994 elections,education was operatedby 19 departmentsorganized by race and geographicallocation, under the administrationof 14 cabinetswhich implementedtheir own regulationsin terms of at least 12 EducationActs. (See Annx 1)
Page 2 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
The situation is complicated immeasurably by the destruction of the culture of learning and teaching, and the politicization of education that came about in the context of the struggle against apartheid policies. The unintended consequences of these circumstances are twofold. First, learning outcomes are low (one measure of which is matriculation examination results) and levels of repetition and drop out are high among African students, leaving them insufficiently prepared to go on to higher levels of education and training. In addition, approximately 1.8 million African children of school-going age (Grade I through 12) are not in school at all. Thus, in either case, most Africans (and to some extent coloureds) have not been offered adequate preparation by the education and training system to become economically productive adults. This conclusion applies to all the former African departments, even those that were relatively better resourced.
Unskilled Labor Force. Apartheid policies have also produced very low levels of cognitive and technical skills among African and coloured working-age adults, including the current generation of unemployed youth. The poor and meager educational opportunities offered to blacks have produced high rates of adult illiteracy and innumeracy. Literacy is estimated to be 60% nationwide. While this is higher than the average of 50% in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is lower than in Botswana (72%), Zimbabwe and Indonesia (74%), Mexico (90%) and Thailand (91%)4. Moreover, as many blacks start out from a weak cognitive skills base, the situation has been exacerbated by the limited chances to obtain occupational skills training. In the formal employment sector, apprenticeship schemes (as well as certain categories of skilled jobs) have historically been reserved for whites, thereby cutting off an otherwise-obvious route to skills acquisition and upgrading. Further, within the informal employment sector, chances for most blacks (and especially Africans) to acquire skills are extremely limited.
Limited Technical Professional and Managerial Skill Base. Given the poor-quality education that has been offered to black children and youth, it is not surprising that very few have been able to reach the advanced levels of education and training that lead to acquisition of high level technical, professional and managerial skills. The number of Africans able to surmount the hurdles of basic education and move up the educational ladder is minuscule: out of every 10,000 African children who enter the school system, only 27 will ultimately qualify for university acceptance, and only one of these will qualify in either mathematics or science.
B. GOALS FOR THE FUTURE
Within these three thematic areas rest a range of policy issues and budgetary trade-offs that will confront the Government of National Unity as it begins to strengthen its human resource base during the transition to an equitable, unified, productive society. At a macro level, our view is that South Africa will need to move the economy toward a more labor-demanding pattern of growth. But this will have to be complemented by a strategic agenda to reform education and training, both to prepare future generations for economically-productive lives, and to upgrade the skills of the current generation of workers and unemployed youth. In this context the challenges include: assisting families to ensure that their young children have the developmental foundation that will allow them to benefit from formal schooling; establishing a sound, high-quality education system for all South Africans; ensuring skills upgrading and basic literacy and numeracy for the working- age population; refining the objectives, size and shape of tertiary education in order to dramatically increase the number of highly-trained and educated blacks who will be needed to manage the New
4 WorldConference on Educationfor All, MeetingBasic LearningNeeds: A Visionfor the 1990s. Unicef (1990)
Page 3 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
South Africa. A related set of decisions will also need to be taken regarding the specific responsibilities of government, households and the private sector in the finance and provision of education and training, with special attention given to mechanisms to empower communities. Moreover, these objectives will need to be achieved within a relatively static public resource base.
In order to begin reversing the multi-faceted legacy of apartheid, our view is that fundamental policy reform and redirection of public investment toward greater equity and efficiency will need to be undertaken. At the same time, there is also potential for productive collaboration between Government and the private and NGO sectors to strengthen and expand education and training in a number of areas.
* At the base of the educational pyramid -formal schooling - we believe that immediate goals should include expanding access and improving instructional quality to ensure universal literacy and numeracy of the school-age population. Top priority for the use of public resources should be given to constructing a formal educational system that is able to accommodate all school-age children and to produce graduates with essential cognitive, social and civic skills. As South Africa moves to implement a National Qualifications Framework that will allow individuals to move back and forth between nonformal and formal education, it will be all the more important for the formal (as well as any new nonformal) system to be able to offer high-quality education. With respect to early childhood development (ECD) programs, our view is that despite the demonstrated success of high-quality (and initially high-cost) programs in other countries, major public investment in this area should not be undertaken until the impact of such programs has been evaluated in South Africa. In the short-term, communities and the private sector should continue to play an important role in the finance and provision of ECD services.
* At the level of skills upgrading, the goal should be to improve the productive competencies of both the current workforce as well as currently-unemployed adults and youth. Here we believe that close collaboration between goverunent and the private sector will be critical in addressing this multifaceted set of issues. While we are cognizant of historical market failure in South Africa in this area, we believe that in the new South Africa the lessons of international experience merit consideration. These indicate that government's role should be limited to creation of an enabling environment and provision of incremental finance, leaving the private (industrial) sector to take major responsibility for the provision of relevant training.
* Finally, high-level technical and professional education needs to be made available to a much broader share of the population to ensure that in the years ahead the country's public and private sectors can become increasingly productive and well run. As South Africa already charges fees for tertiary education, the challenge ahead will be to devise a system of higher education finance that will allow greater numbers of academically-qualified financially disadvantaged students to enter and complete tertiary education programs. Another goal should be to ensure that public institutions of higher learning operate efficiently, both in terms of unit cost per graduate and relevance of tertiary programs to labor market needs.
Page 4 SouthAfrica: Education Sector StrategicIssues and PolicyOptions
II. INTERNATIONALEXPERIENCE: ISSUES OF PROVISIONAND FINANCE
As South Africa begins to confront the wide range of problems that plague the education and training sector -- from preschool to general schooling, adult basic education and training, and tertiary education -- we believe it is helpful to consider what experience from other countries has shown. In light of tight resources it is especially useful to identify those public investments that have paid the highest social dividends and promoted greater equity. This section therefore reviews experience from around the world. While these findings cannot be applied mechanically, they do offer important lessons, guidelines and warnings. These, in sum, inform the South Africa-specific discussion in the rest of the paper.
First, experience worldwide indicates that education contributes significantly to an array of economic and social goals. From an economic standpoint, education has been repeatedly found to play a major role in accelerating growth. World Bank analyses have estimated that investments in education explain up to 30% of GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1956-83. In East Asia, such investments have been credited with playing the major role in fueling the economic miracle in that region.5 Income differences across countries are also due in substantial part to differences in average levels of education. Further, education enhances productivity -- both in the formal sector, which translates into higher wages, and in the non-wage sector, especially in rural areas.
At the same time, education promotes greater equity. By creating a more skilled labor force, it plays a role in increasing the share of wages in total output, thus benefiting the labor sector in general. Education can also improve income distribution among classes. In some countries, differential enrollment rates have been found to explain as much as one-third of inequalities in income distribution. In general, the higher the average level of schooling, the more equal the income distribution. Although less directly, education can also contribute to poverty reduction, especially through the many noneconomic benefits it confers, such as lower fertility, greater nutrient intake, better sanitation practices, and improved household health. In addition, education has important intergenerational effects. The children of educated parents tend to be healthier, live longer, and are likely to obtain more education than did their elders. Education can help children born into poverty to escape it even if their parents do not.
A. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION
Of all levels of formal education, primary and secondary education make by far the greatest contribution to growth and equity. Primary education in particular has consistently been shown to have unambiguous, positive effects on growth in all countries during all periods that have been studied. In a growth accounting model of successful East Asian economies, primary enrollment was the leading contributor to predicted growth rates, explaining 58% of growth in Japan and 87% in Thailand. Moreover, dramatically lower primary enrollments in Sub-Saharan Africa during the same period account for most of the disparity in growth between the two regions.6 The most important role of primary schooling is to teach basic literacy and numeracy, which produce major benefits for society and lay the basis for later schooling for individuals. For example, literacy rates alone have been correlated with increased overall investment and (holding investment constant)
5 WorldBank, The East Asian Miracle(New York: Oxford 1993),p. 52.
6 Whileenrollment rates explainmuch of East Asian growth, the quality of educationwas also critical.
Page 5 South Africa Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options increased output per worker. The productivity effects of primary education have also been repeatedly documented; on average, farmers with four years of education have been found to produce 8% greater output than those with no schooling.
The equity effects are equally pronounced. First, there is the simple arithmetic of redistribution. Because the poor typically make up a plurality of those enrolled in primary schools (but represent successively smaller proportions at each higher level) the share of public spending they capture is greatest at the primary level. Second, there are income effects. As general education expands, the scarcity of skills in the economy declines. The reduction in skill differentials means that workers with skills acquired through basic education are no longer able to exert excessive market power, and earnings differentials diminish accordingly. Third, primary education, especially for girls, unleashes beneficial social synergies that advantage the poor. Women with four years of schooling have, on average, 30% fewer children. These children, in turn, are twice as likely to reach adulthood and far more likely to enroll and remain in school themselves. The reduced fertility and disease burden aids the family in the short to medium term; the greater lifetime earnings potential of children provides security for the family over the long run. In addition, of course, reduced poverty and fertility benefit society as a whole. The interplay of these effects explains widespread findings that the primary enrollment ratio is the most important educational variable influencing the incomes of the bottom 40% of the population.
Secondary education also plays a key role in national development. By building on basic reading, language and computational skills, secondary education allows students to master the core cognitive skills that best equip them for work, specialized training, or further education. In Peru, for example, workers who completed secondary school have a 50% greater chance of receiving on-the-job training than those with primary education only. In South Africa, the dearth of these cognitive building blocks is acute and especially serious. Without them, young women and men cannot hope to obtain more specialized training or to start the small and medium enterprises the nation needs to achieve more dynamic and equitable growth in output and employment. Secondary schools cannot, however, compensate for weak primary education.
In summary, general schooling - especially primary schooling - is the most equitable and the most cost-effective investment the state can make in education. Because it enhances learning at all subsequent stages of education, it warrants major investment on efficiency grounds. And because it has such a redistributive effect, primary schooling is among the most powerful instruments for equity available to governments. In East Asia, the portion of the education budget dedicated to general schooling averaged near 80%, and in some countries as high as 90%. Experience there and elsewhere has shown that the key is to make such investments as effective as possible by focusing on the inputs that enhance learning. Suggested specific priorities for South Africa are addressed in Section III, below.
B. VOCATIONAL SKILLS TRAINING
Experience in many countries has shown that public investment in vocational education and training has frequently produced low economic returns. This experience reflects the fact that such education (provided both at secondary and at post-secondary levels) is often very expensive to offer, inefficiently provided, and frequently out of touch with labor market needs. However, experience in a few countries has also demonstrated that returns can be higher when such training is properly designed. By developing labor skills and enabling firms to boost productivity, model pre-employment vocational programs in four middle-income countries were estimated to have
Page 6 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options generated social returns ranging from 12% to 25%. We believe the externalities, or spin-off effects of such training, while generally not nearly as great as those from general education, merit some public involvement in and encouragement of such programs.
The case for a direct public role in such training, however, is much weaker than in general education. In fact, the most salient lesson of training programs elsewhere is, again, the importance of having a strong foundation of general education (notably core skills such as communication, thinking and problem solving) on which to build. Moreover, because vocational training tends to reach only those who have completed a certain amount of general education, it often does not benefit those most in need and has less redistributive impact than general education.
In the vocational realm, therefore, experience indicates that governments should limit their direct provision of such training and subsidize it only where market failure or equity demands. Because the vast majority of gains from such training are captured by workers (through higher wages) and firms (through higher productivity), the need for incremental public funding is small. With respect to delivery, it is clear from experience that such training is most effective and efficient when offered either by firms themselves or by private training institutions, rather than by government. Necessary skills vary from one firm to another and change rapidly. In the main, therefore, firms prefer to provide the training themselves to ensure the best fit with their own needs. Even where private institutions offer the training, they have been most successful where they have been highly specialized and maintained close contact with industry. That is, the more closely they replicate in-house training, the more successful they are. Such in-firm and firm-connected training has proven much less costly than public pre-employment programs, with better employment outcomes. Such training is also more efficient in internalizing costs. Workers accept lower wages during the training period, making employers more willing to hire them; afterward, their enhanced skills qualify them for higher wages over the long term. For their part, employers are willing to bear the direct costs of the training, since trained workers help them realize higher productivity.
Governments are thus best advised to focus their efforts on those areas where firms underinvest in such programs. The most common impediments to private provision are the fluidity of the labor market (which makes employees likely to move with their skills), the predominance of small firms (which often lack capacity to offer such training), and imperfections in credit markets (making workers unable to finance their own training). In such contexts, governments can play a pivotal role by establishing an enabling environment to encourage adequate private provision. In this vein, a government's most powerful instrument is a payroll training levy, which can induce greater private delivery at little or no public cost. Various methods have been successfully used, but the principle is the same: wages are taxed and the money is then used to fund private training (through rebates) or public training. In essence, this lets workers shift a small share of their future income forward to pay for training they might otherwise not be able to afford, thus solving the credit problem. Because the training is funded by workers themselves, firms will be less reluctant to offer it on the grounds that employees may leave for other employment. Further, if the funding is available to all accredited institutions (not just firms), firms too small to provide training themselves can rely on private institutes, which will benefit from the pooling effect such levies make possible. Although such schemes do marginally raise the relative price of labor, this effect is generally negligible from the employer's perspective.
The other principal rolefor governments is oversight. Successful training systems the world over have at their apex a specialized national training authority for planning, monitoring
Page 7 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options and regulation. These bodies have been most successful where they have encompassed representation from employers, unions and government and where they have been independent of ministries of education. Multisectorality and autonomy are both critical to ensuring such authorities have the flexibility to respond to the unique institutional demands of worker training.
Governments can also assist by changing policies that might distort private incentives to invest in such training. High minimum wages, guaranteed public jobs and narrow skill differentials in public wage systems can all discourage investment in training, since they offer employers no advantage to taking on less-skilled workers. Even where an enabling environment has been created, however, private supply of training may still be inadequate, especially where private capacity is weak. Experience from more than 50 developing countries suggests that only in such cases is public delivery of training worth undertaking, and even then only as a transitional measure. The lessons of that experience suggest the importance of the following:
* Choosing proper objectives. Training should be provided by governments only to those workers who cannot find private training or who have been displaced by economic restructuring. Publicly-provided training should be highly specialized and clearly linked to job availability. Such programs should not be expanded indiscriminately in an effort to solve youth unemployment. Experience shows that not only can they not do so, but they may actually make workers less attractive to industry. Most entry-level jobs require few skills, and employers generally prefer to hire untrained workers with lower wage expectations and then provide the training themselves.
- Ensuring a market orientation. Public training programs should use close contacts with employers and labor market analyses to continually track demand for various skills. Systematic assessment of costs and employment outcomes is essential.
* Ensuring institutional responsiveness to the market. Whereas good general education imparts general cognitive, social and civic skills that do not change much over time, good vocational training focuses on specific skills with a view toward job placement in competitive industries. Training therefore responds to a very different set of signals from regular education and requires managerial flexibility above all. Public training institutions should thus be separated from ministries of education and formal schooling systems, with their managers held accountable for employment outcomes.
One special case that bears noting is apprenticeships. Perhaps the oldest of all training approaches, apprenticeship programs have been shown to be relatively effective in teaching certain crafts and internalizing costs. They can have a positive effect on employment and incomes and be of particular benefit to the poor. At the same time, apprenticeships do not create new knowledge, often discriminate on the grounds of sex or ethnicity, and are of increasingly doubtful utility in modern economies as systems of production change rapidly and modem technology takes on a steadily greater role. More important from a policy perspective, however, apprenticeships have traditionally worked with a minimum of public intervention and at no cost to the public. Emerging evidence thus suggests that they are generally best left alone.
Page 8 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
C. TERTIARY EDUCATION
Tertiary education institutions contribute to growth through the impact of their graduates on the dissemination of knowledge and through the spin-off effects of basic research and development. Since these benefits are not fully reflected in the salaries of graduates or payments (where available) for research, private sources will tend to undersupply such education. Further, in most countries, public investment in higher education greatly exceeds what economic efficiency would dictate and invariably benefits students from relatively-affluent backgrounds, who attend such institutions, at the expense of the disadvantaged, who generally do not.
Consequently, where higher education is public (as is largely the case in South Africa), governments should insist on the maximum feasible equity, efficiency and quality from tertiary institutions. While this calls for an ambitious set of educational refon-ns beyond the scope of this paper, the necessary financial measures are straightforward.
* First, mobilize private financing through cost-sharing with students, increased reliance on donations, and by eliminating subsidies on noninstructional costs. Tertiary-level graduates will enjoy greater lifetime earnings because of their education and should be required wherever possible to contribute to it.
* Second, provide financial support to those students who are qualifiedfor admission but lack the means to pay. This can be done in a number of ways, including provision of grants and loans. Since capital markets rarely recognize human capital as coilateral, the public sector must play a facilitating role, especially for students from poor households. However, given the discouraging experience with student loan programs around the world, any new loan program should be designed with care to avoid the frequent problems of inequitable finance and low repayment rates. Governments can also support to low-income students indirectly by offering financial incentives to higher-education institutions that attract such students into their programs.
* Third, there is usually scope to increase efficiency in public funding. Negotiated budgets, for instance, provide tertiary institutions with little incentive to enhance quality or efficiency. Several OECT)nations have recently begun to experiment with tying institutional funding to performance criteria. Public finance for tertiary institutions might be linked to admissions policies that favor qualified applicants from poor households, or that attract applicants to specific faculties related to demonstrated labor market needs (e.g., science, technology, accountancy, management). Such steps merit consideration in the developing world as well.
III. CONSIDERATIONS FOR PUBLIC POLICY
This section moves the discussion back to the South African situation. The first part highlights the major features of public spending on education. The second part focuses on what we consider to be the most critical problems facing school education in South Africa: inequitable educational access; poor instructional quality; and insufficient planning and management capacity. Discussion of each problem is followed by presentation of a number of proposals for related public policy reform and publicly-supported program interventions.
Page9 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
A. THE EDUCATION BUDGET
The budget analysis presented below summarizes the major findings of a recent study of public education expenditure in South Africa between 1987/88 and 1991/927,which presented for the first time analysis of public spending in all 19 former departments of education in the country. Government is now in the process of updating the sector spending picture nationwide, which will allow analysis of new spending initiatives in the light of current expenditure, population growth, and new demand for education services. Although the expenditure study findings reflect the past, they are useful in indicating recent spending levels and trends, and provide a framework within which Government can formulate future sector spending policies and programs. Annexes II through VI present a range of basic expenditure data drawn from that study.
Overall, the level of public spending on education in South Africa is generous in comparison with other middle-income countries. Between 1987/88 and 1991/2, the education budget grew steadily from R9.9 billion to R27.3 billion; the proposed 1995/6 budget is R32.2 billion8 . The five-year period covered by the study saw an average annual increase in real terms of 5.2% while population growth was 2.2%. By 1993/94 education made up 24.4% of the national budget. This represented 7.3% of GNP, a higher share devoted to education than in many other middle-income countries (e.g., Mauritius, Brazil, Botswana, Malaysia, Venezuela, and Korea). The proposed 1995/6 represents 25.8% of total non-interest expenditure.
The intrasectoral allocation of public education resources is broadly appropriate for an upper-middle income economy. The allocation of approximately 75% to primary and secondary education, 10% to university education, and 7% to technical education, vocational skills and teacher training closely resembles that of many economically-strong East Asian countries at a similar point in their own development. Given the central role played by governments in financing primary and secondary education, and our view that investment at these levels of the system merits priority, we believe South Africa should maintain the budget share currently allocated to these subsectors.
Within subsectors, however, spending has historically been highly inequitable and has remained so despite recent progress in closing the gaps between blacks and whites. Thus, while the share of recurrent spending allocated to the former African departments grew and the share of the former House of Assembly (the department serving almost exclusively white children) declined during the 1980s and early 1990s, by 1991/92 whites (comprising 13% of the total population) still received 34% of the education budget, while Africans (who make up 75% of the population) were allocated only 48%. The same pattern is reflected in per capita spending. In 1991/92, despite a narrowing of the gap between blacks and whites, the government was still spending 4.2 times as much on a white primary pupil as on the average African pupil, and at the secondary level the ratio of per capita spending on whites and Africans changed only slightly between 1987/88 and 1991/92, falling from 4.2: 1 to 4.0: 1. Average expenditure in theformer African departments, however, masks wide disparities in per capita spending levels over the period 1987/88 to 1991/92. Thus,
Bucklandand Fielden,op.cit.
8 One US dollar equalsR3.5
Prre 10) South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options for example, while primary per capita expenditure in 1991/92 was Rl,281 in QwaQwa, it was R486 in Transkei.
Analysis of the incidence of public education spendinigby inconmegroup illustrates a similar pattern. At every level of schooling, data compiled by the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) for the expenditure study referred to aoove, and the Living Standards and Development Survey (LSD)10 indicate that the share of spending received by the bottom three household expenditure quintiles is lower than the population shlaresof each of those quintiles, while the share of spending on the top two quintiles is higher than thleirpopulation shares. The poorest quintile, which represents 29% of the population, receives 10.6% of tertiary spending, 18.2% of secondary spending, and 26.9% of primary spendinig. In contrast, the richest quintile, with a 12.5% population share, receives 32.2% of tertiary spending, 25.3% of secondary spending, and 18.9% of primary spending. These conclusions are shown in the Figure below.
Figure 1: Public Spending on Primary. Secondary and Tertiary Education by Quintile
35 30 25 20 1 5
5a.0L _I _ 0 Poorest 11 III IV Richest Population Quintile and Public Spending for Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Education
*Population *Primary ESecondary MTertiary Spending Spending Spending
Inequitable spending patterns are also evident in other parts of the education budget. In teacher education, per capita spending on whites in 1991/92 was four times as great as on Africans, and over twice as great as on Indians. In technical college education, over half the budgetary resources (and half the enrollments) were allocated to the House of Assembly. And in pre-primary education, over 80% of the funds were absorbed by the former white department between 1987/88 and 1991/92.
9 DevelopmentBank of SouthernAfrica. PublicExpenditure on Educationin South Africa. 1987/88-1991/92.Vol 1: FinancialInformation, Vol 2: ContextualInformation. South Africa(1993)
'° Project for Statisticson Living Standardsand Development.Living Standardsand DevelopmentSurvey (LSD). SouthAfrica (1993)
" However,there are no importantdifferences across departments with respectto student:staffratios in the collegesof education,all of which are inefficientlylow at about I 1:1.
PageI I SouthiAfrica: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
Analysis of the budget by program also indicates that historically very little has been allocated to programs other than primary, secondary and tertiary education. In 1991/92 less than 4% of public education spending went to technical education, less than 3% to teacher education, 0.4% to preschool, and 0.3% to adult and vocational education. Greater attention to all these areas will be critical to future economic growth and social stability. Thus, assuming that for now the budget will not grow in real terms, new resources will need to be found to support these programs; these could come from a combination of efficiency savings and from non-public sources. In the areas of early childhood development and adult basic education and training, we support Government's general proposal to establish partnerships with communities and the private sector. In order to operationalize this strategy, a clear delineation of the respective responsibilities of the various players in thteareas offinance, delivery and regulation will be needed.
Analysis by budget item indicates two areas of concern. First, thlebudget share targeted at personnel expenditure is high and has been increasing steadily in recentyears. Personnel costs rose every year between 1987/88 and 1991/92, reaching nearly 75% by the end of the period. In some departments, and in particular in some of the former Bantustans, this share was even higher, as high as 90% in KwaNdebele. Moreover, at the levels of primary and secondary education, the personnel salary bill absorbs an even higher portion of total recurrent spending. In 1991/92 in nearly every department this item exceeded 90% of primary and 85% of secondary expenditure. Second, and as a direct result of such high levels of spending on personnel,few resources are leftfor expenditure on quality-enhancing instructional materials, system monitoring and supervision, or expansion of other subsectors. This point is illustrated by the fact that in 1991/92 only 3.2% of total recurrent spending was directed at textbooks, educational materials, stationery, equipment, and library purchases.
Finally, urgent attention needs to be paid to the budgetary implications of implementing tlhegovernment's policy of offering a "receptionyear" to allfive-year old children in the country. Although we agree that the policy is educationally sound, it is not clear that there are sufficient public resources to put it into practice. Assuming that the recurrent costs of the reception year -- including teacher salaries, instructional materials, and equipment -- would be approximately equal to the costs of running the current SubStandard A class, it is likely that implementation of this policy will require approximately Rl billion annually 12 . In addition, there are also capital costs associated with the policy, since the current primary school infrastructure is based on seven years of education. Assuming modest economic growth and a constant budget share allocated to the education sector over the nextfive years, preliminary analysis indicates that there are not sufficient funds to offer the "receptionyear"(assuming afive year phase-in) and at the same time expand educational access, improve instructional quality, andfinance the range of other priority programs to which the government is committed. 13 Funds would be available for the reception year only ifimplementation of othter new initiatives is delayed, and/or if efficiency gains can be made through various sector policy changes. Two areas for such possible savings -- slowing the growth of teacher salaries and reducing capital expenditure through temporary use of double-shifting -- are discussed in the following section.
12 Implementationof this programwould also requirea large cadre of specially-trainedteachers that does not currentlyexist.
13This analysiswill be made availableunder separatecover.
Page 12 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
The budget analysis presented above suggests the following general implications for future sector spending:
* Given the imperative to expand and strengthen the newly-integrated educational system, and to do so within constrained budgets, resources will have to be managed and spent much more efficiently;
* In light of the relatively generous provision of budgetary resources to the education sector, few, if any, new public resources are likely to be allocated. Thus, if total sector resources are to grow, additional funds will need to come from a combination of cost sharing arrangements with households, the private sector, and donor agencies;
* The current budget share allocated to primary and secondary schooling closely resembles the share assigned to these sub-sectors by a number of successful East Asian countries and thus appears to be about "right." However, if the share going to support general education is not to decline, there is currently little scope to allocate significant additional public funds to other sub-sectors;
* To maximize the return to public investment in education, resources will need to be spent equitably and to yield a significant improvement in learning outcomes; and
* Unconstrained growth of the sector salary bill threatens government's ability to finance non-salary, quality-enhancing inputs within the formal education system, as well as to expand public support for other parts of the education and training system.
The following discussion addresses these issues.
B. SUGGESTED AREAS FOR FUTURE PUBLIC INVESTMENT
As noted above, South Africa confronts a long list of needs in the education and training sector, all demanding attention and scarce resources. In our view, given the fact that resources are limited, the challenge is to assign priorities among this list of needs. In light of both international experience and our own assessment of the South African situation, three broad areas stand out as critical to the future development of education in the country, and as appropriate areas for Government's priority attention and allocation of public resources. These are: (1) expanding access to primary and secondary education; (2) improving instructional quality at these levels of the system; and (3) strengthening education sector planning and management capacity.
We believe that problems in these three areas need to be tackled immediately to ensure that the next generation of adults will possess basic cognitive, communications and civic skills, and will thus be prepared to lead economically-productive lives. The three areas should also be addressed simultaneously if there are to be improvements in learning outcomes, not just in input measures. Moreover, expanding and strengthening primary and secondary education are preconditions to improvements in all other parts of the education and training sector, since they form the base of the pyramid on which all other sector investments must stand. Finally, as evidence from East Asia noted above shows, investments in primary and secondary education are critical in their own right for their positive effects on health, family size, worker productivity and poverty reduction. This section outlines our understanding of the problems in each of these areas, and proposes some policy options and program interventions that we believe could help to address them.
Page 13 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
1) ExpandAccess to Primary andSecondary Education
One obvious measure of the crisis in education is inadequate and inequitable access to formal schooling. The South African term "classroom backlogs" refers to the gap between the number of classrooms available and the number needed to accommodate at acceptable pupil/classroom ratios either current enrollments or all school-age children. The problem is rooted in the policies of Bantu education, through which government had divested itself of the responsibility to provide physical facilities for African pupils. This was done first by requiring local (African) communities to contribute half the capital cost of new buildings (the "rand-for-rand" scheme), and later by passing the obligation on to the former homeland governments. This abdication of responsibility and deliberate neglect of African education was designed to perpetuate inferiority. Compounding this racial discrimination were the class stratifications of apartheid.
As a result, the construction of physical facilities did not keep pace with the increase in the demand for schooling --particularly in rural areas -- and thus the backlogs began to emerge. The growing politicization of education from 1976 onwards, combined with continued enrollment growth led to some increase in public recurrent spending. However, capital expenditure was insufficient, reflecting both deliberate policy not to repair or replace facilities destroyed through political unrest and an incapacity to deliver due to lack of community consultation, as well as economic constraints imposed during more than a decade of stagnant or negative economic growth.
Magnitude of the Problem. Measurement of classroom backlogs includes three distinct aspects of the problem: (1) the number of classrooms needed to provide an acceptable student/classroom ratio for those students already in the system; (2) classrooms needed if the system is to accommodate the approximately 850,000 (primary and junior secondary) school-age children currently not in school; and (3) the number of classrooms needed to keep pace with annual population growth, currently estimated at 3%. On the other side of the equation must be included the number of school places taken up either by overage children or by those repeating a grade, as these places will eventually become available once educational quality -- and thus internal efficiency -- improves. In addition, any excess capacity available in formerly-white, Indian and coloured schools should be taken into account, although this "excess" was never significant and is declining as African children have begun to move into these schools over the past several years. The extent of the overall backlog depends heavily on the assumptions made about the appropriate pupil/classroom ratio. In 1992, average student:classroom ratios varied considerably by race:
Table 1: Average Student:Classroom Ratios by Race and School Level
Race Primary Secondary
White 20:1 15:1 Coloured 26:1 23:1 Indian 29:1 27:1 African 49:1 45:1
Pag'e 14 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
Around these averages there is wide variance. In many African primary schools, for example, it is not uncommon for as many as 100 pupils to be congested in a single classroom built for 40. In five of the ten former homelands14, average pupil/classroom ratios exceed 50:1 in both primary and secondary schools. And in all six of the former self-governing territories (SGTs), secondary schools had ratios of over 50:1. Further, urban areas generally fare better than rural areas. Farm schools typically have four or five classrooms at most and serve vast catchment areas. In the worst-off rural areas, classroom space is at such a premium that some classes are simply held outdoors on school grounds. And in many rural areas, secondary schools are absent altogether. Rural crowding has been aggravated in recent years as urban families have sent their children to school in rural areas to escape township violence. The exception to this pattern is in new urban informal settlements, where access may be even more limited than in many rural areas. Beyond the need to construct new classrooms to respond to these backlogs, many schools require rehabilitation to repair the damage done during the years of struggle against the apartheid state.
Indicative Costs of Responding to the Problem. Clearly, the quality of education suffers when classes are so large that teachers cannot devote time to individual pupils and when classroom management by necessity takes priority over instruction. The question for policymakers, then, is how to respond to the needfor smaller classes within tight budget constraints? International research indicates that although learning is enhanced in classes smaller than 25 pupils, there is very little difference in learning outcomes in classes with between 25 and 40 pupils. When there are over 40 pupils per classroom, however, achievement falls. We think it is reasonable to consider providing classroom space in all primary schools on the basis of 40: 1 and in all secondary school classrooms on the basis of 35:1.
Using these ratios, it has been estimated that to accommodate all pupils in the system in 1991, an additional 29,113 primary classrooms and 14,099 secondary classrooms would have been needed. The former departments most in need of additional space are Transkei, KwaZulu, Lebowa, Gazankulu and KaNgwane. Assuming the average cost per classroom (including toilets and other facilities, but excluding furniture) is approximately R60,000 in 1991 rands, this would amount to a total of R3.1 billion to meet the backlog of pupils already in school in 1991/2. To accommodate the estimated 850,000 children of primary and junior secondary school age who are currently out of the system, an additional 22,000 classrooms would be required, at a cost of RI.3 billion. The estimated total cost of building these 65,000 new classrooms would be R4.4 billion (this represents approximately 13% of allpublic spending in 1993/94). If a major school construction program is to be undertaken, these figures will need to be updated to reflect population growth and price increases. At the same time, new estimates will also need to take into account the number of school places that will be freed up once repetition is reduced to a more reasonable level (in SubStandard A in many former African departments the rate has been as high as 30%) and overage children move progressively out of the system. With respect to classroom rehabilitation, it was estimated in late 1992 that, nationwide, work would be needed on 120,000 primary and secondary classrooms, at an estimated cost of RL.6 billion.
Options to Reduce Costs. Assuming that public budgetary resources for education will not increase appreciably in the near future, the question then is how to provide adequate classroom space for all pupils while holding public expenditure to a minimum. This task is complicated by the fact that even if resources were not constrained government has in the past been able to build, at
14 The homelandswere composedof what were referredto as the IndependentTBVC States (consistingof Transkei,Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei)and six Self-GoverningTerritories (SGTs).
Page 15 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options most, only 6,000 classrooms a year. Both these constraints lead to the conclusion that maximum use of all school facilities will need to be made.
One approach that has been used in many countries to respond to this dilemma is double shifting. Although there are many different definitions of this term, it is meant here to refer to a scheme in which a single school building is used by two sets of classes and two sets of teachers. Depending on the size of the school, it is possible to have either one or two sets of school administrators. It is obvious that using classrooms twice a day rather than just once offers potential for important cost savings. But the concern raised regarding the double shift scheme is that pupils will be shortchanged and that learning outcomes will suffer. International experience on a range of double shifting schemes, however, indicates that as long as pupils have a minimum offive hours of instruction per day, there is no evidence that double shifting leads to lower learning outcomes. 15 So, for example, the same set of classrooms could accommodate a first shift from 7:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m., and a second shift from 1:00 until 6:00 p.m.
Consideration of this policy option in South Africa is complicated by the fact that various double session and "platooning" schemes were imposed selectively under apartheid. Some black communities thus reject any notion of double shifting on the grounds that it represents "second class education", and that since it was not used in white schools it should not be used in black schools. While this response is understandable, it does not reflect experience with a well-conceived double shift system in which pupils are assured adequate instructional time each day. Nor does it take into account the severe budget constraint within which the new government is operating. If a sufficient number of classrooms is to be made available to provide adequate space for all South African children -- in line with the government's policy of ten years of compulsory 16 education -- every option should be considered, at least during a transition period. Implementation of a properly-structured double shift scheme in the most overcrowded areas offers potentialfor important cost savings (along with reduction in class size in many areas and scope for enrollment growth) without jeopardizing learning outcomes. Such a policy is particularly attractive in a situation such as South Africa's, where the school system is currently being called on to absorb an unusually large number of pupils in this post-election period. Once this temporary "bulge" of newly-enrolled pupils of all ages makes its way through the system, the need for classrooms will decline.
Another mechanism for increasing access and lowering costs is through enhanced participation of communities. This can come in cash or in kind, depending on the resources of the community. In either case, when communities become partners in the construction, maintenance, and governance of their schools, there are two main benefits. First, as the community takes on a sense of ownership for the school, community members protect the school and its grounds from external threats of vandalism or political disruption. Across South Africa there are already disadvantaged communities that have taken it upon themselves to guard a school round the clock because they believe the school is theirs. This sense of ownership is vital, and is enhanced when communities have a financial stake in the school itself. Indeed, community partnership from the beginning must be a precondition for participation in cost-sharing. A second, related point is that when communities view a school as their own, they will take responsibility for repair and
15 Colclough,C. and Lewin,K.M., EducatingAll the Children. Oxford:Clarendon Press (1993)
16 ANC ElectionManifesto (1994)
Page 16 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options maintenance. This is a very different situation from the typical one in which communities see the school as the property -- and the responsibility -- of government, and thus where broken windows, for example, go unrepaired indefinitely. Experiences with community schools financed in part by the Zulu Trust, the IDT and other such local trusts bear out these lessons.
Finally, careful attention should be given to ways to reduce the cost of school construction. South Africa can no longer afford to construct classrooms on the old DET or HoA models. Rather, efforts will need to be made to ensure that facilities provide adequate space and protection from the elements, but that they are not unnecessarily expensive. Attention should be given to school size and structure, building materials, and method of construction in a comprehensive approach to lowering school construction costs. As suggested by many in South Africa, schools can also be put to good use during non-school hours for other community activities.
2) Improve Instructional Quality
The Problem. Among the many problems that plague education in South Africa, we believe that the poor quality offormal education offered to blacks is at the top of the list. Whether viewed from the perspective of inputs (e.g., teachers, textbooks, physical facilities), throughputs (the process of what goes on in the school), or outputs (promotion rates and matric results), very poor-quality education has been provided to most black -- and especially African -- children. This is not surprising, given that the objective of apartheid education policies was to limit the post-school opportunities of these children essentially to menial occupations. Today the results of those practices continue to be evident. Most notable are data showing which groups manage to pass through all 12 years of formal schooling. Table 2 reflects these disparities.
Table 2: Academic Survival Through Standard 10 (Grade 12)
Race Percent
White 88 Indian 53 Coloured 20 African 14
This overall picture of racial disparity hides even more glaring problems found in some of the former homeland departments. In Transkei, for example, only 55% of pupils make it as far as Standard 2, and less than 10% of the original cohort remain in the system at Standard 10. In other former African departments, an attrition rate of 25% in the last three years of the 12-year cycle is common. The following Figure further illustrates the problem, highlighting the poor success rate among the 14% of African children who manage to make it to Standard 10:
Figure 2: Educational Outcomes Among African Children
of 10,000 African children : enter SubStandard A 1,400 : reach matriculation 113 : pass matriculation 27 : are eligible for university entrance I :is eligible to enter university in mathematics or science
Page 17 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
Sources of the Problem. Even for the children who manage to attend school for several years, African education is so weak that the preparation it provides pupils is practically inconsequential. There are many aspects to the problem. First, the teaching of core subjects such as maths and science is minimal, as suggested by the matriculation figures above. Curricula and pedagogy in most subjects are outdated, and standards were set low. (Related, of course, is the issue of the unacceptable apartheid slant to the curriculum, which is now being revised.) Second, the teaching of English (the medium of instruction in African schools) is so weak that many pupils leave school without even basic English communication skills. This should not be surprising, since it is not uncommon for an African child to reach school speaking only his/her ethnic language, be taught for the first four years in a second language, switch in grade five to English as the medium of instruction, and be required to learn Afrikaans simultaneously. We strongly believe that official policy on language of instruction should be modified to ensure that children are given enough time to become proficient in one language before being expected to move onto a second, and time to master the second language before having to work in a third.
In addition to curriculum and language policy, the poor quality of African education can be traced to several other factors, most critically: poorly-trained teachers, weak school management, and inadequate supplies of instructional materials. Inadequate physical facilities, noted above, also play a role. Further, in many communities children's ability to learn is also hindered by malnutrition and illness. This section discusses these key input and throughput factors which help explain the current weak state of black education in South Africa.
* Weak teacher training and development. Good-quality education cannot exist without good teachers. While many other factors are important educational inputs, their value is limited without the presence of competent teachers. Conversely, as long as the teacher is able to provide a stimulating, creative classroom environment, pupils can be taught the essential skills to question, analyze and learn without a great deal of expensive material inputs. Despite the central importance of teachers in the provision of good-quality education, too little attention has been paid to their selection, training, and ongoing professional support and development. This is particularly true for teachers coming from the former African departments. To date, insufficient effort has been made to ensure that they are well-trained prior to entering the classroom, and well-supported once they take up their professional responsibilities. The result -- poorly-prepared teachers who often lack core subject mastery and pedagogical confidence -- is a major cause of poor learning outcomes among African pupils.
Preservice teacher training. Under apartheid, since teaching was one of the few careers Africans could enter, it became a popular profession. Although the former government provided the resources to build large numbers of training colleges, it did little to regulate or evaluate the instruction offered within them. As a result, many colleges are little more than glorified secondary schools, where little has been expected of either the tutors or their students. A major weakness in the training programs is a reliance on a highly theoretical approach, and the very limited relationship between the colleges and the schools in which their students will later teach. Practice teaching, linking on-the-job experience with professional training, is almost nonexistent. Teaching of maths and science is often relegated to "general science" survey courses, thereby doing little to strengthen the trainees' mastery of these core subjects. And pedagogical instruction is effectively limited to outdated, authoritarian approaches, thus providing little in the way of positive role models to the teacher trainees. The result is that most graduates complete their preservice training
Page 18 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
unprepared for the demands of classroom teaching, lacking the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to make a difference at the classroom level.
Inservice teacher training. Inservice training sponsored by the former departments of education has been seen more as a road to higher salaries than as a means for teachers to improve their subject knowledge or pedagogical skills. This is due to the automatic link betweenformal qualifications and the salary scale. The practical effect of this policy is three-fold. First, it encourages teachers to focus more on their own "upgrading" than on teaching their pupils. Second, it encourages teachers to pursue inservice training in the "soft" subjects, regardless of the teachers' classroom teaching responsibilities. Thus, for example, teachers receive a salary increment after having studied criminology, Biblical studies or African languages, even if they are responsible for teaching maths or English. Third, the policy is directly responsible for upward pressure on the sector wage bill. A recent study indicates that in Gauteng Province, 25% of serving teachers are currently upgrading their qualifications. 17
At the same time, there are a range of interesting inservice training activities that have been undertaken by NGOs across the country which are geared to strengthening classroom teaching practice. At present, most such programs do not lead to higher qualifications and salaries. While it is likely that some of these programs are doing a good job, in general little is known about their impact on classroom practice and on ultimate learning outcomes to indicate whether they are worthy of expansion or replication.
School-based support. Once in the classroom, many teachers are left without the professional support they require for ongoing professional development. This is due in part to the historic view in South Africa that the job of school inspectors was precisely that -- to inspect, in order to find fault with and to criticize teachers. Thus it is not surprising that inspectors have not been trained to supervise and support practicing teachers. This approach has begun to change in the former Department of Education and Culture/House of Assembly, where emphasis in recent years has been given increasingly to supervision and support of teachers, rather than inspection. In many black schools, however, the lack of classroom-level support has also been related to the politicization of the education sector, which has led to a breakdown of the supervision/inspection system. Even in the former Indian department, a model by many standards, school inspections have not taken place in three years because some teachers have threatened anyone who would try to evaluate teacher performance.
The highly-charged, politicized atmosphere in some townships has also led to the "eviction" of school principals, effectively preventing any support from this obvious source. Even in less violent parts of the country, however, it is impossible for school heads to supervise their own teachers. A group of 12 primary school principals in QwaQwa last year reported that they had been physically threatened by certain teachers in their schools for merely attempting to provide classroom-based guidance and support.
* Weak school management. International experience indicates that the role of the school head or principal is a key factor in explaining successful schools, and that investment in
'7 The Urban Foundation,Johannesburg (1994)
Page 19 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options strengthening the managerial skills of school principals pays high returns. Yet in the former African departments, especially, principals have generally not received the type of training they need to effectively run a school, and received little if any support from their former departmental headquarters. Principals generally lack skills in school timetabling, staff development, materials and supplies management, and community relations. Further, in all the former departments, selection of principals and other school-level managers was often done on the basis of subjective (rather than objective) criteria.
The effects of weak school management are many, including loss of instructional time, caused by inability to properly schedule classes; poorly motivated and unsupported teachers; the unavailability of key instructional inputs at appropriate times in the school year; and unproductive relations between the school and the surrounding community. Although several NGO programs are working with principals to strengthen their skills in these areas, such courses are able to reach only a fraction of the total number of principals across the country in need of such training.
* Insufficient/inappropriate instructional materials. Although textbooks and other instructional materials cannot, in and of themselves, guarantee that pupils learn, they do play an important role and their absence from the classroom puts additional pressure on poorly-trained and inexperienced teachers. As noted above, public spending on textbooks, stationery, equipment, and library purchases is very low, falling from 4.8% to 3.2% of total education recurrent spending between 1987/88 and 1991/92. In some departments as little as 1.5% of total spending was allocated to these instructional material inputs. On a per capita basis, real spending at the primary level declined in the former departments of QwaQwa, Gazankulu and KaNgwane by over 40%; in Lebowa the reduction was 68%. And at the secondary level, during the same period real per capita spending on this item fell between 30% and 50% in the former House of Assembly, Lebowa, KwaZulu and Gazankulu. In 1991/92 primary per capita expenditure on textbooks, library purchases and stationery ranged from R95.1 in the House of Representatives (coloured department) to RI 5.2 in KwaZulu. Low levels of spending were aggravated in some of the forner African departments, where books burned in the context of political action were not replaced, leaving already-undersupplied schools with even fewer instructional materials.
* Poor child nutrition and health. Although the World Bank has not undertaken work in the area of child health and nutrition, our visits to schools across the country suggest these problems as likely impediments to learning in some areas. The Presidential Lead RDP Primary School Nutrition Project reflects the new Government's concern for these issues. Anecdotal evidence and common sense support the view that good school infrastructure and high-quality instruction cannot lead to positive learning outcomes if children are too weak, sick or distracted to learn. The hypothesis that healthy children learn more has received considerable support in the past few years as research has begun to demonstrate that poor health and nutrition are significant determinants of school achievement. Research on the health and nutritional status of South African children is underway, and the little information that is available indicates that many of them confront the same health and nutrition problems that impede school performance in developing countries around the world. The most common of these include: 18
18 Levinger,Beryl, "Nutrition,Health and SchoolPerformance," in The Forum for AdvancingBasic Educationand Literacy(Vol. 3, Issue 2), Cambridge,Massachusetts (February 1994)
Page 20 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
* Protein-energy malnutrition (PEM). This is related to poverty and caused by poor diet. Early and concurrent malnutrition can affect school aptitudes, the age at which children enroll, and their concentration and attentiveness. In severe cases, it has a negative impact on cognitive achievement.
* Micronutrient deficiency. Deficiencies of iodine, iron and vitamin A pose serious threats to learning achievement and health. Deprivation of iodine affects intelligence, psychomotor retardation, mental and neurologic damage, cretinism and impaired hearing, and visual problems. Children with iron deficiencies have low levels of alertness, attention and concentration, and show little interest in their immediate environment. Insufficiency of vitamin A is associated with acute respiratory infection, increased severity of measles and diarrhea, and a range of vision problems, including blindness. Vitamin A is also related to growth, including brain growth, and its deficiency often accompanies PEM. Recent studies indicate that the health damage from vitamin A deficiency accounts for 10% of the total disability among young children, and 3% of all the easily-correctable health damage in the age group. 9
* Helminthic infections (Worms!. Parasitic infection, especially hookworm infection, is associated with impaired cognitive functioning, absenteeism, underenrollment and high rates of attrition. These infections pose significant educational problems for school-age children, as they limit the pupil's exposure to classroom stimuli and may compound the detrimental effects of micronutrient deficiencies and protein-energy malnutrition. In addition, helminthic infection (as well as malaria), can lead to iron deficiency.
- Temporary hunger. Coming to school without breakfast is a problem for any child, even those who are otherwise well-nourished. The result is inattentiveness, which leads to poor school performance. If the hungry child is also malnourished this effect is even greater.
Approaches to Improve Instructional Quality. A strategy to begin to improve the quality of classroom teaching and learning should address all of the problems sketched out above. At present an array of initiatives is being designed in South Africa to tackle various parts of the problem of instructional quality. Key among these are two RDP Lead Presidential Projects (one on the Culture of Learning, the other on School Feeding) and the Thousand Schools Project. In addition, the National Ministry of Education's participation in the Southern Africa Consortium to Measure Educational Quality (SACMEQ) should prove valuable as the new govermnent begins to track progress in redressing historic inequalities related to school quality. The following are some broad interventions for consideration by South Africans engaged in these and related activities, along with some preliminary indicative cost estimates.
a) Strengthen preservice teacher training. The majority of teacher training colleges will need to be strengthened in the areas of staff development, curriculum reform, pedagogical approaches, and practical student teaching components. Efforts to make improvements in these areas could benefit from collaboration between the colleges of education and a range of outside role players, including: university departments of educalion, successful NGOs working in the inservice training field, and other concerned and thoughtful educationists based in primary and secondary schools across the country. The human resources needed to restructure and
19 WorldBank, EnrichingLives: OvercomingVitamin and MineralMalnutrition in DevelopingCountries. Washington,D.C. (1994)
Page21 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options reinvigorate preservice teacher training exist in South Africa; we believe the challenge is to coordinate and mobilize them to "rethink" how best to produce good teachers.
This might best be done on a provincial (or in a few cases, cross-provincial) basis. As a first step, provincial education authorities could bring together a broad-based team from the colleges and other key interest groups to design pilot activities to strengthen preservice teacher training. Important areas for immediate attention are the teaching of science, maths, and English. These initiatives might include mechanisms to strengthen inservice training as well through, for example, creating college-based teacher resource centers and supporting mentor teachers in the schools. Once the pilot experiences are evaluated it would be possible to design longer-term models based on the most promising strategies to emerge from these experiences. Donor financing could be tapped to support this experimentation process, as well as the broader implementation of lessons learned from it.
In our view, other initiatives to strengthen preservice (and inservice training) include restructuring of the colleges of education in the following ways:20 physical upgrading to cost-effective size; facilities upgrading, including libraries, lecture rooms and administrative offices; and establishing new divisions for inservice training and teacher resource centers, including inservice training staff located within the colleges.
b) Expand and improve inservice teacher training. We agree with South African policy analysts who suggest that preservice and inservice training should be planned as an integrated continuum of teacher development. We also support the view that inservice teacher training needs to be improved in terms of both its quantity and quality, and appropriately targeted to support first the teachers in greatest need. At the top of the list is strengthening the quality and increasing the number of teacher educators and trainers; only in this way will it be possible to improve the quality of preservice training, and thereby allow inservice training to become developmental rather than remedial in its focus.
Second, priorit' grouns of unqualified and underqualified teachers should be upgraded. In 1991 there were approximately 30,000 unqualified teachers who are generally young, female, and teaching in rural primary schools with no teacher training at all. Since many of these people only teach for one year before going on to tertiary education or into another career, only those who have stayed for two or more years and who have demonstrated a commitment to teaching should be targeted for upgrading through inservice training. It is estimated that using this criterion the number in need of upgrading is closer to 15,000. Also in 1991 there were approximately 60,000 unqualified teachers without a Standard 10 certificate; we support the suggestion that the top priority for upgrading within this group should be secondary school teachters of science and mathematics
20 Centre for EducationPolicy Development,Implementationi Plans for Educationand Training. Johannesburg(April 1994)
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
Page 22 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
Further, inservice training that leads to formal upgrading (and, at present, salary increases) should in all cases be directly related to a teacher's classroom responsibilities, scarce resources should no longer support inservice upgrading in "easy options" that are not school subjects or in subjects unrelated to a teacher's area of classroom responsibility. Teachers in oversupplied subjects should receive upgrading in new subjects (e.g., design and technology) and in subjects for which there is an undersupply of trained teachers (e.g., mathematics and science).
In addition, given the important in-service training role played by NGOs, such programs should be evaluated to determine the impact they are having at the classroom level (is teaching improved? are pupils learning more?) as well as their cost-effectiveness. Such evaluations are beginning to be undertaken but more work of this sort is essential to help determine which programs can demonstrate success, and which can do so at a reasonable cost. For those that meet these two criteria, government should support their expansion, incorporate some of their elements into the preservice training curriculum, and include them within the formal certification process.
c) Increase school-based support. As long as an atmosphere of intimidation precludes professional interactions between teachers and principals/school inspectors, the quality of education will suffer. While there are no easy prescriptions for changing this atmosphere, some of the ideas discussed above (e.g., mentor teachers and teacher support centers linked to the colleges of education) could play a role in providing support to classroom teachers. Also essential is the professional support offered by the school principal, discussed below. Regardless of the mechanisms devised to provide school-based support, experience indicates the critical importance of regularly bolstering, nurturing, and training teachers in their own schools.
d) Strengthen school management. Priority attention should also be devoted to strengthening school-level management. First, this will require that provincial departments of education apply objective selection criteria in the process of selecting school managers. Second, it will entail providing more and better management training for principals and senior staff. Here, too, NGOs can play a role; where these have been evaluated and found to be effective, they should be given the opportunity to share their methods and materials more widely. This is also an area where successful business sector practices might be brought in, e.g. in basic financial and personnel management skills training. Regardless of what mix of training providers is used, several elements should be present. First, school-level management training (like all training) should be based on an assessment of needs and not on assumptions about what it takes to be a good school manager. Following from this, the training should be practical and related directly to the daily responsibilities and problems confronted by principals. Theoretical approaches and curricula that do not respond to the realities of running schools that are often over-crowded, under-resourced and highly politicized will not be useful. Lastly, the orientation of such training must be collegial, supportive, and participatory; a top-down approach is unlikely to succeed.
e) Increase the supply and relevance of instructional materials. A key part of any strategy to strengthen classroom teaching and learning should include the infusion of sufficient quantities of appropriate and up-to-date leaming materials. This will require efforts on a number of fronts. First, expenditure on this budget item must not be allowed to fall below an agreed minimum amount per student, and any additional spending on this item should be targeted at the most poorly-provided schtools, rather than applied equally across all schools. It has been estimated that increasing expenditure on this item by 50% would cost R122 million annually in 1991/2 prices. In addition, the cost of a 50% increase in the per capita equipment allocation to African schools would be R50 million, which would be sufficient to bring these schools nearly into line with the
Page 23 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options allocation to formerly-white schools in 1991/92.
However, adequate expenditure levels alone are not sufficient to guarantee that materials reach classrooms in a timely fashion. The second point is thus to strengthen management of instructional resources at all levels of the system to ensure that materials are ordered and distributed in time for the start of the academic year, so that students no longer find themselves without textbooks until the third term (as was often the case in African schools). Third, to ensure provision of a broad range of appropriate instructional materials, government should take advantage of books, wall charts, maps, and other materials produced by various NGOs whenever and wherever these are found to be appropriate.
f) Expand and target nutritional and health interventions. Interventions to respond to the major health and nutritional problems hindering school performance can be prioritized on the basis of their effectiveness and ease of implementation.23 International experience indicates that where deficiencies exist, priority should be given to alleviating iodine, iron and vitamin A deficiencies and parasitic infection. These interventions can be fairly easily targeted and administered in a school-based setting. With respect to alleviating these three micro-nutrient deficiencies, recent research has found that "no other technology in the world today offers as large an oFportunity to improve lives and accelerate development at such low cost and in such short time." Experience also suggests that only moderate priority should be given to supplementary feeding to relieve short-term hunger. Where these programs are in place their benefit can be maximized by improving targeting, simplifying operational procedures, ensuring community participation, and integrating complimentary interventions such as deworming, micronutrient fortification or supplementation, and nutrition education with the feeding. Supplementary feeding to relieve PEM should generally receive low priority in light of the logistical and infrastructure demands and high costs of this approach.
Province-specific investigations are being undertaken into the current nutritional and health status of school-age children, the findings from which can be used to inform the design of targeted interventions to improve children's health and nutritional status. In all cases, successful school-based interventions require coordination between education and health authorities, and community awareness and support. The work of various task forces supporting the RDP Lead Presidential Project on School Feeding is increasingly incorporating these findings into their own recommendations for South Africa.
Potential to Reduce Costs. While many of the mechanisms to enhance instructional quality will require additional financial resources (at least at the outset), there are two policy changes that offer considerable scope for cost savings.
The first, and most important area in which savings could be made concerns teacher salaries. As a result of extensive analysis undertaken by The Urban Foundation on this issue, it is now widely understood that teacher salaries are "moving rapidly onto an unsustainable trajectory"2 5
23 Levinger,op cit.
24 WorldBank (Enriching Lives ), op cit.
25 The Urban Foundation,Teacher Salariesin SouthAfrica: A PolicyPerspective, Johannesburg
Page 24 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
and that action must be taken urgently to stop the current trend. The analysis identifies two major aspects to the problem: first, the inordinately-long teacher salary scale and second, the direct link between qualifications upgrading and teacher salary levels. These pressures are exacerbated by the need to redress past inequalities with respect to level of qualification and level of posts occupied by women and black teachers of both sexes, and by the need to expand educational access for the estimated 850,000 children of school-going age.
We support the suggestions made by the National Department of Education to stop the current upward spiral of teacher salary costs 26 Chief among these is linking teacher remuneration to level of professional responsibility, rnther than to academic and professional qualifications. Such a shift will require time and careful consultation and negotiation. More immediately, however, it should be possible to compress the salary scales, thereby making it possible to raise the salaries of those at the bottom of the scale, while simultaneously limiting salary increases at the top. We agree with the Department that policy changes such as these, while sensitive, are essential if South Africa is to be able to afford all the other non-salary educational inputs needed to construct and sustain a balanced system.
Second, some scope for cost reduction exists in the area of student:classroom ratios in schools where they are lower than capacity. Efforts to make efficient use of classroom space (as well as teachers) could be particularly important in former white schools, where the numbers of students per classroom and per teacher have historically been inefficiently low. Clearly there are limits to how much more efficiently these classrooms can be used due to the small size of many of them, and their inaccessibility to most African students. Nonetheless, the public expenditure study discussed above estimated that if average student:classroom ratios of 40:1 in primary schools and 35:1 in secondary schools were applied, per capita expenditure would fall from R3,298 to Rl,960 at the primary level, and from R5,181 to R3,322 at the secondary level in 1991/92 rands. Analysis indicates that between 250,000 and 500,000 additional students could be accommodated in former white schools at limited additional cost. Potential savings have been approximated at between R330 million and R560 million, depending on the number of additional pupils enrolled.
In addition, there is also scope for unit cost savings in the colleges of education through increasing the current inefficiently-low student.-staff ratios. While expansion of college output at the present student:staff ratios would be prohibitive, expansion could be affordable if unit costs were to be substantially reduced. It has been estimated that if staff allocations are held constant and the student:staff ratio is increased from 11:1 to approximately 17:1, it would be possible to expand enrollment in the colleges by 50% for R276 million less than it would cost if current student: staffing levels were to be maintained.
3) Strengthen Sector Planning and Management Capacity
The Problem. A serious weakness that pervaded most of the former 19 departments of education is the limited capacity to plan for and manage the new, unitary education system. The problem is multifaceted. First, due to historic inequalities, the number of head office staff was unevenly distributed across former departments, leaving especially the former homeland
(November1993)
26 NationalDepartment of Education,Education and Trainingin a DemocraticSouth Africa: First Steps to Developa New System,Pretoria (February 1995)
Page 25 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options departments seriously understaffed. Second, many of the professional staff now in post, again especially those in the former homeland departments, have not been trained. This problem is now being exacerbated by the incorporation into the new provincial and national structures of new staff who are inexperienced and untrained. Third, the process of selecting professional staff for head office posts has often been based on highly subjective criteria, creating bureaucracies filled with political loyalists and deprived of many committed, talented people. Fourth, local capacity to train education managers and planners is limited and fragmented, and does not exist at all in key functional areas related to system transformation. Finally, there is no sectorwide mechanism to coordinate a training needs assessment and oversee for the provision of the training required.
Before addressing these issues, it is important to note that these problems will be resolved in the context of the evolving relationship between the newly-constituted national and nine new provincial departments of education. As noted in a major sector strategy document recently issued by the National Department of Education, the sections of the Constitution that deal with education "are not straightforward."2 7 If ambiguities and tensions are to be effectively resolved, we believe that a range of questions should be answered.
* First, clear delineation of responsibility between the two levels of government is required. Although the Constitution indicates the dominant role of the provinces in the provision of primary and secondary schooling, and the responsibility of the National Ministry for provision of university and technikon education, other areas of responsibility are less clear. Chief among these are teacher education and management information systems. Agreement on who is responsible for these areas will need to be reached to avoid conflict, overlapping initiatives, and failure to act caused by uncertainty.
* Second, a range of questions concerning theflow of publicfinancial resources to the sector need to be addressed. For the system to run smoothly, clarity is needed on who allocates these funds and on what basis resource allocation decisions are to be made. In other words, what role will be played by the National Department of Education (as well as the Department of Finance and provincial governments) in the construction of provincial education budgets?
* Third, transparent mechanisms to anticipate and resolve conflicts between the national and provincial departments of education should also be put in place.
The following paragraphs are presented with this context in mind.
*Scale of the Staffing Problem. The historic, unequal staffing pattern is illustrated by the following table which shows the allocation of professional staff in relation to pupils by former department. The departments with fewer budgetary resources and a growing student population, and thus greater needs for planning and management skills, tended to have fewer staff. The disparity was most evident in the former homelands, where the number of students per professional staff is nearly six times as great as the number in the former House of Assembly.
27 Ibid.
Page 26 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
Table 3: Professional Staff Across Education Departments28
Department Students/Professional Staff Ratio As a proportion of HOA
HOA (White) 601 DET (African in RSA) 840 1.4 HOD (Indian) 1,412 2.3 HOR (Coloured) 1,771 2.9 TBVC states 3,355 5.6 SGTs 3,490 5.8
* Training Needs. Not only did most of the former African departments have fewer staff per student to run their systems, but these staff tended to have little professional training to perform their responsibilities. In general, there is relatively strong capacity in basic management and planning, performance appraisal, procurement systems and training development in the former tricameral (white, Indian and coloured) departments, elements of DET, and a few of the former homelands. However, such capacity is in short supply in some of the former TBVC and most of the SGT departments. In these "underskilled" departments, for example, very few staff who hold the title of "education planner" have any training in planning. At most, such staff received a three-day course several years ago from RIEP29 on how to collect system statistics. They have not received training, however, on how to use these statistics to help formulate and monitor implementation of a comprehensive operational plan. Without appropriate professional training, these staff are not adequately prepared to carry out their jobs, with the result that very little if any planning was actually done in these departments.
In all the former departments there are skills gaps in the functional areas of policy analysis, monitoring and evaluation, management information systems, planning-budgeting linkages, public communications, and organizational change. This lack of skills reflects the fact that these functional areas have not yet been incorporated sufficiently into the South African educational system, and thus training in these areas is not widely available. However, if system transformation is to be achieved, skills in these management areas will need to be developed.
*.Selectionprocess. In addition, department management strength was weakened by the tendency of those in positions of power to select staff on the basis of their political loyalty, rather than on their professional competence or ability to learn the skills needed to do the job. This was particularly true at the central bureaucratic level, from which there was widespread exclusion of strong, committed school principals, many of whom are female.30 When such competent people applied for department-level posts, they were turned down repeatedly because they were either not
28 Departmentalacronyms refer to the followingformer structures: HOA(House of Assembly);DET (Departnent of Educationand Training);HOD (House of Delegates);HOR (Houseof Representatives);as noted earlier, TBVCstands for Transkei,Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei,and SGTs refersto Self- GoverningTerritories.
29 ResearchInstitute for EducationalPlanning, University of the (Orange)Free State.
30 Out of 65 executive-leveljobs across all former educationdepartments, none was held by a woman. Among 1,462 middle-levelpositions, women held 91.
Page 2 7 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options political loyalists, they were outspoken, or they were female. The result of this exclusionary, subjective approach to selection of system managers was to compromise the quality of the work done at the central level of most former departments. Further, many highly-qualified applicants were frustrated and disillusioned by these practices, knowing that their promotion chances were linked more to political alliances and/or gender than to their technical competence. The response of many women, and white women in particular, has been to leave government service.
*Training providers. The universe of training providers is diverse and fragmented. It includes formal department-based training programs; informal department-based training (through on-the-job mentoring by senior officials); non-education-specific programs such as those offered by the Public Service Commissions of the former SGTs and TBVC states; private sector companies or consultants (usually in conjunction with the installation of operational systems such as PERSAL); tertiary institutions; and NGOs (which focus largely on school management and other professional concerns). The capacity and capability of these providers to offer the types of training needed has been limited by lack of resources, lack of trust between the tertiary institutions and NGOs on the one hand and the former government on the other, and the residential nature of most programs.
The current context and content of training for education planners and managers is also characterized by the following elements: lack of a national strategy to address the sector's management and planning training needs; the menu-driven nature of most formal training programs; limited financial resources for training in departmental budgets and thus a very weak training infrastructure on which to build future training programs; and the general isolation of tertiary institutions and NGOs from active involvement in meeting training needs.
Proposals to Fill the Gaps. In all the former departments the magnitude of the skills gaps is related to the magnitude of the staffing gap. Thus, if the new education system is to be managed well, analysis indicates that more staff will need to be added and trained. This conclusion runs counter to the widely-held view that the process of unifying the education system will lead to the retrenchment of excess staff. To the contrary, a 1993 study31estimated that at least 1,900 professional administrative/managerial staff would need to be added nationwide. However, it was also estimated that as many as 1,700 current staff are likely to choose to leave the education bureaucracy, which means approximately 3,600 new staff appointments would be needed to fill all management positions in the provincial and the central education departments. The same analysis recommends that trainingfor 2,400 professional staff should be undertaken immediately, and training should be offered annually to at least 700 professional stafffor the nextfour years. This training burden will be made heavier to the extent that the experienced staff leave the new provincial and national education authorities, and are replaced by new staff who lack experience and require training. Undertaking this daunting agenda will require the education system to pursue changes in an aggressive manner, which in itself implies that training will be needed to provide the required skills to do things differently than in the past.
In order to substantially strengthen management and planning capacity throughout the education sector in South Africa, a mechanism needs to be created to plan and coordinate training activities nationwide, and to ensure that education managers and planners in all provinces have access to the training they need to run their educational systems. Such a mechanism should not be responsible for provision of training per se, but rather should rely on the
31 Fehnel,opfcit.
Page 28 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options wide range of providers already on the ground and others that will emerge in response to clearly articulated education sector management training needs. Further, the initial focus of training should be on a critical mass of professionals in each of the high-priority functional areas noted above. And for new provincial and national headquarters staff and for staff from most of the former homeland education departments, training on basic management skills, performance appraisal, procurement systems, and training needs assessment, design, and evaluation should also be offered. The recommended strategy of focusing on a critical mass is based on the experience of other countries that have undergone rapid, radical transfornation with an emphasis on decentralization and the introduction of educational innovations, and limited training resources. When training resources are focused on a critical mass, there is greater probability that the training will be directly linked to efforts to initiate change and that it can be modified to respond to emerging demands. Skills acquired during such training should be reinforced in subsequent years with on-the-job training.
In light of the magnitude of the training challenge, it will be important to use the best of all the existing training providers, and for these providers to expand their capacity (numbers of trainees per year) and capability (areas of training expertise). In addition, providers will need to offer training that is less bureaucratic in orientation, less academic and more practical, with greater focus on developing analytical and problem-solving skills. Further, the approach must be based on actual need, rather than the trainers' perception of need, and must move quickly away from the top- down, supply-driven orientation that has characterized much of the trair.ing offered in the past. Providers must also restructure course offerings so that officials will not need to be away from their offices for long periods of time; new courses can be offered on an intensive weekend, one-week or even evening basis. Finally, training should be directed not just at individuals, but at organizations more broadly if organizational change is to be sustained.
Indicative Costs. Cost estimates have been made for a training strategy that includes training a critical mass of trainers and staff in high priority functional areas with follow-on training for sustainability, with a focus on the middle management level. The total cost has been estimated at US$10 million, while the annual estimated cost of providing training to sustain changes introduced through the firstyear of operation is estimated to be US$1.2 million. While these costs may appear high, experience from other countries indicates the value of investment in targeted training. Indeed, a frequent cause of the failure of educational reform programs has been underestimation of the importance of management components and failure to adequately fund organizational change strategies, especially training.
With respect to the salary costs that would be associated with the hiring of an additional 1,900 professional administrative/managerial staff, a rough calculation can be made. Assuming an average annual salary and fringe benefits of R80,000 (equivalent to the average cost of a school inspector), plus average annual operating costs of R40,000, these new staff would add on the order of R15 million annually to the total sector salary bill.
IV. AREAS FOR PUBLICIPRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS
This paper has suggested that support for general schooling, and primary education in particular, merits priority in terms of public resource allocation. However, there are other areas within the education and training sector whose development and strengthening are also important, but for which public resources will be limited. We believe these areas lend themselves to
Page 29 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options partnership arrangements among government, households, and the private sector. This Section looks briefly at three such areas -- early childhood development, skills upgrading, and tertiary education -- and suggests how they might be supported by the various role-players.
A. EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT
South African data indicate that over one-fifth of African children who enter the first year of schooling do not go on to the second year, and by the third year one-quarter have either dropped out or been held back.32 Given such high rates of dropout and repetition in the first few years of schooling, some contend that early childhood development programs could make an important difference in both the schooling and life outcomes of these children. It is also suggested that reductions in these high rates of inefficiency would free up resources that could be used for other purposes. At present the research into the effects of such programs is limited, and thus does not offer a firmfoundation on which to recommend significant expansion of public expenditure. Further, the only large-scale early childhood development programs in developing countries have mainly been community- and privately-managed andfinanced (e.g., in Thailand and Nepal), and tend to operate in urban areas.
At the same time, experience in the United States and elsewhere suggests that well-targeted investment in young children before they enter the formal school system can yield a high return -- if the program is of sufficiently-high quality. Findings from a longitudinal preschool-effectiveness study now in its third decade suggest that "high-quality active learning preschool programs can help young children in poverty make a better transition from home to community, and thus start them on paths to becoming economically self-sufficient."33 The study assessed whether such programs can provide short- and long-term benefits to children from economically-disadvantaged communities and at high risk of failing in school. In comparison with a group of children who received no preschool program, the children who participated in the program under study were found at age 27 to have significantly: higher monthly earnings; higher percentages of home ownership and car ownership; higher level of schooling completed; lower percentage receiving public social services at some time in the previous ten years; and fewer arrests, including fewer arrests for crimes of drug taking or dealing.
With respect to educational performance, the program group produced significantly higher scores than the no-program group on tests of: intellectual performance (IQ) from the end of the first year of the preschool program to the end of first grade at age 7; school achievement at age 14; and general literacy. Further, the program group spent significantly fewer school years in programs for educable mental impairment, and had a significantly higher percentage reporting at age 15 that their school work required preparation at home. The study also found that for females the program appeared to create the interest and capacity to stay in school and graduate, in spite of difficulties presented by such problems as teen pregnancy. For males the preschool program did not appear to affect their likelihood of high school graduation, but it did have a positive effect on their adjustment to society.
32 Taylor,Nick, Fallingat the First Hurdle:Initial encounters with the formal systemof Africaneducation in South Afric, EducationPolicy Unit/University of the Witwatersrand(July 1989)
33 Schweinhart,L.J. and Weikart,D.P., eds., SignificantBenefits: the High/ScopePerry PreschoolStudy ThroughAge 27 ,Ypsilanti,MI: High/ScopePress (1993)
Page 30 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
This research demonstrates the potential of high-quality (and initially high-cost) preschool programs to improve children's success in school, increase their high school completion rates, reduce their involvement in crime, and increase their adult earning. However, the results should not be overgeneralized since they document the impact of a program with specific characteristics. Earlier findings from Head Start research indicate that in order to sustain the positive IQ effects achieved during the preschoolyears, high-quality instruction needs to be maintained through the schooling experience; where this is not the case, such gains tend to "wash out" by the time the chUd reaches age ten.
Given the high costs associated with high-quality programs, it is unlikely that public funds will be available to support this type of service for all the children who could benefit from it. The challenge in South Africa is how to offer a service that is both high-quality (i.e., one that will have a positive impact on the child) and affordable. One response to undertake targeted research. An initial approach might be to evaluate the costs and effectiveness of some of the major early childhood development initiatives currently operating in the country. In addition, pilot programs could be undertaken to determine the effect on program outcomes of varying program inputs (e.g., staff:child ratios, teacher qualifications, parental support). We believe that any decision to allocate additional public funds to these programs should be made only on the basis of the results of such evaluations and pilot experiences.
A second response to the challenge of financing and providing high-quality service to all those in need is through public/private collaboration. Government is already planning to work with other interested role players to encourage communities, the private business sector, and NGOs to support early childhood development programs, although at this point the specifics of finance, training, and delivery have yet to be worked out. In order to move forward, agreement is needed on the responsibility of each of the role players involved One possible way to delineate responsibility might be to establish a system in which: Government sets certification and operating standards, and finances the training of teachers; NGOs in collaboration with teacher training colleges provide the training; communities provide the space; and communities in conjunction with the private sector pay for teacher salaries and class inputs. As financial and human resources are severely constrained, program development and expansion will need to be undertaken gradually. At the same time, as noted above, it will be critical to continue efforts to strengthen primary education so that whatever gains made through public and private investment in early childhood development programs are not lost once children enter normal schooling.
B. SKILLS UPGRADING
In the wake of apartheid, South Africa today confronts acute inequalities in the distribution of skills across the working-age population. Besides being fundamentally unfair, this inequity has in the past hindered economic growth in the country. A World Bank model of the South African economy suggests that in the medium-term, investments in skills upgrading could contribute as much as 0.5% to annual GDP growth. Clearly, government will have to play an aggressive part in redressing the imbalance in training, for the good of the economy as well as to redress historic inequity.
Given the magnitude of need, it will be important to ensure that private and public resources devoted to training have the greatest possible impact. The general lessons set out in Section II, above, are highly relevant here -- especially those concerning a training levy and a
Page 31 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options national training authority. At the same time, integrated and complementary measures could be undertaken on three fronts:
* Encourage as muchfirm-based and private sector training as possible. South Africa has a tradition of good private technical colleges and other training institutions. In 1992, such institutions and firms together trained 200,000 people, or about one-third of all those in post-school training that year. As noted in Section II, such training is invariably more cost-effective and market-sensitive than public programs, so should be used to the fullest extent. The challenge is to expand this capacity to accommodate as many students as market analyses suggest can be employed.
* Where public training is provided, improve its effectiveness and efficiency. In South Africa, this will call above all for exposing public institutions to market tests (e.g., fees) and making them accountable to employers and students. South African technikons and technical colleges already have multiple links with employers through advisory committees, student placements, industrial scholarships and collaborative research. These links should be maintained and, where necessary, strengthened. Further, keeping training institutions separate from the educational establishment will permit the managerial flexibility essential to making such institutions agile and responsive to market conditions.
* As with all post-secondary education, the criticalfirst step in improving training outcomes is to strengthen primary and secondary schooling. Training in specific skills is more effective when it builds on a strong foundation of general education. At present, South African industries must devote significant in-house training resources to teaching core skills that disadvantaged students were not able to acquire under apartheid education. Before they can offer more specialized training, general education needs to be improved.
* Finally, over the longer term, it will be important to ensure that technikons continue to provide quality technical training rather than move toward an increasingly academic track. International experience suggests such programs augment their success by becoming more specialized, not less. Already, some 40% of technikon students are in non-technological fields such as social sciences and liberal arts. This trend augurs ill for graduates' job prospects and highlights the need to maintain close contacts with employers. In Great Britain, converting polytechnics to universities has not served students well on the job market but has increased the unit costs of post- secondary schooling considerably.
C. TERTIARY EDUCATION
Since higher education is almost entirely public in South Africa, the nation already invests about enough in this subsector to ensure adequate supply from the perspective of social externalities. Other than increasing quality and efficiency as discussed in Section II, the main challenge therefore is how to make tertiary education affordable for qualified -- but economically disadvantaged -- students. As student tuition fees have doubled over the past five years and now exceed R3,000 a year in many institutions, this raises a serious barrier to access to many talented students. One effective mechanism to address this problem is through the formula by which
Page 32 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options
tertiary institutions are financed. As noted earlier, institutions are more likely to enroll economically disadvantaged students when they are given a financial incentive to do so.
Parity in access can also be supported to some extent through establishment of a program of student financial assistance. However, such programs are only efficient and equitable if they are financially sustainable. In many countries, student loans have meant subsidized interest rates, high default rates and high administrative costs, resulting in overall repayment ratios well below 50%. Losses of this magnitude reduce the resources available for future student assistance and ultimately bring such programs into political disrepute. Lessons from these programs and others indicate ways to minimize these problems. In countries with well-developed financial and public administration structures, it is possible to devise a scheme in which loan repayment is administered neither through commercial banks nor through tertiary institutions, but rather through the tax system or social security system. Under such a scheme payments can be deducted automatically once students enter the labor market, which would result in higher compliance and lower administrative costs. Another program feature worthy of consideration would be to link the repayment amounts explicitly to post-education income, thereby assuring greater equity; i.e., those graduates who go into high-paying professions will pay more for their education than those who go into less-well remunerated fields.
Careful consideration will need to be given to the following issues during design of a loan program: the source of initial capital to start the program; eligibility criteria (i.e., will the program target only students who cannot afford to pay fees, or will it be more broadly available?); the level of subsidy, represented by the difference between the interest rate paid by the student and the real rate of interest; the mix of financing options (loan, grant, work/study); administration of the program; and, as noted above, questions related to payback provisions. The National Commission on Higher Education is now in the process of considering these issues.
V. A PREREQUISITE FOR ACTION -- INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS
This paper has highlighted what the World Bank considers to be the critical role of public investment in equitable, effective and efficient formal primary and secondary education. Within this context, the paper has argued that in order to begin to reverse the legacy of apartheid, public resources should be directed at three central challenges: expanding access to formal schooling, improving instructional quality, and strengthening education sector management and planning capacity -- all within a framework of budget constraints and other legitimate competing claims on public resources. A range of specific policy and programmatic options and approaches have been proposed to respond to these challenges.
In order for South Africa to begin to address these challenges in a concrete fashion, we believe there is an urgent need for clear delineation of responsibility between the national, provincial and local levels of government. Resolution of a range of questions related to these relationships is a prerequisite for meaningful strategic and operational planning by either the national or provincial departments of education.
In particular, there are important outstanding questions regarding the source and flow of sector funds, some of which can be resolved only by agents outside the education bureaucracy. One such question is whether provincial and local governments will have authority to generate their own sources of revenue to support education in their jurisdictions, and what implications this will have for provincial ability to deliver education. Other budgetary questions pertain more narrowly
Page 33 South Africa: Education Sector Strategic Issues and Policy Options to the education sector. For example, the processes by which financial resources will flow from the national to provincial level need to be clearly articulated. In this vein, will the national level be in a position to play a role in equalizing per student expenditure across provinces and within provinces? Unless there is a mechanism put in place to assure equal public spending, inherited inequalities will persist. A related question concerns the budget of the National Department of Education, and whether it will include even a small portion of sector funding that could be used to target particularly disadvantaged areas or to pilot new initiatives. Such a tool could be extremely useful to the National Department in its efforts to eliminate spending inequities.
A range of programmatic questions regarding allocation of responsibility among the various tiers of government also relate directly to the Government's ability to begin to solve problems on the ground. The case of teacher training illustrates the point: until it is clear which level of government is responsible for financing, providing, and monitoring inservice and preservice training, the standard of teaching is unlikely to improve. Another example concerns the training of sector planners and managers. The historical disparities across the various race-based departments are now reflected to a great extent in the new provincial departments, with some provinces inheriting far greater numbers of trained officials than other provinces. How will Government ensure that at least a minimum level of acceptable planning and management capacity exists across the board? If national standards are set, which level of government will have responsibility for establishment of selection criteria, selection of trainees, provision and finance?
We believe that these and a range of other questions regarding the relationship between the various tiers of government will need to be answered in order for South Africa to make real progress in assuring high-quality education for all its citizens.
Page 34 Annex I
THE FORMERSOUTH AFRICAN GOVERNANCE SYSTEM (PRE-ELECTION)
RSA "GENERALAFFAIRS" CABINET I 4 TBVC (7) Cabinets | 3 TRICAMERALCOUNCILS OF MINISTERS _ 6 SGT (6) CABINETS J 3 'TRICAMERAL"SYSTEMS 2 "GeneralAfffairs" Dept 6 "SGT" SYSTEMS 4 TBVC Systems DEC(1) Houseof Assembly (2)
0 z 0 C7 0 Z a C) ', A C) 0)< co -4 (3) Department Coloured m ~~~~, 0 CD 0~C
(4)CD CD CD _ CD ID a CI CD~ CD~ -'~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a D C 0 0 - .4(f (5)awithin Ar3n CDAiCD CDV m0 CDt CD m 0~~~~~D~* * .4C CD ~~~~CD . CD0. -. 0 M C
(1)~ ~~0 of Edcaio CDatmnand co ZCulture CD (2 WhitDepartment Z ~0
=-2M PUPILS) (=-2M PUPILS) (=-3M PUPILS) C=-3M PUPILS)
(1) Departmentof Educationand Culture (2) White Department (3) Coloured Department (4) Indian Depatment (5) Africans within South Africa Y (6) "Self-GoverningTerritories" o (7) "IndependentStates" Annex II
Share of Total Recurrent Expenditure by Program (%)
1987/8 1988/9 1989/90 1990/91 1991/2 Control and Administration 4.3 4.2 4.0 3.7 3.8
Pre-Primary Education 0.7 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.4
Primary Education 38.1 40.2 40.9 42.7 42.8
Secondary Education 30.4 29.5 29.8 30.6 30.9
Private School Education 0.5 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.6
Special Education 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.2 2.1
Children in need of care 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.4
Technical Colleges 2.0 1.5 1.7 1.4 1.5
Teacher Education 3.0 3.6 3.3 3.0 2.9
Technikons 2.5 2.4 2.3 2.4 2.4
Universities 13.0 12.0 11.8 10.6 10.0
Adult and Vocational 0.5 0.4 0.6 0.2 0.3
Related and Support Services 1.0 2.5 1 .9 1.7 1.8
Page 36 Annex-I
Share of Total Recurrent Expenditure by Race (%)
Population Share 1987/8 1988/9 1989/90 1990/1 1991/2 Change Assembly (White) 13% 41.7 40.0 38.7 35.8 33.9 -18.7% Delegates(Indian) 3% 5.5 5.4 5.4 5.2 5.2 -5.5% Representatives(Coloured) 9% 13.8 13.7 13.0 13.3 13.5 -2.2% African 75% 39.0 41.0 42.9 45.7 47.5 21.8%
Page 37 Annex IV
Per Capita Recurrent Expenditure on Primary Education by Race Department and Year (Rands)
1987/8 1988/9 1989/90 1990/1 1991/2 Change
Assembly (White) 1, 962 2,100 2, 452 2, 923 3, 298 68.10% Delegates(Indian) 1, 382 1, 544 1, 907 2, 211 2, 482 79.60% Representatives(Coloured) 890 1, 205 1, 365 1, 761 2, 070 132.60% African Departments 345 404 511 677 789 128.70% All Departments 556 638 770 978 1, 124 102.20%
Page 38 Annex V
Per Capita Recurrent Expenditureon African Primary Education by Department and Year (Rands)
1987/8 1988/9 1989/90 1990/1 1991/2 Change
DET 430 504 635 823 990 130.20% SGTs (Total) 303 347 431 606 704 132.3% Gazankulu 553 404 456 674 789 42.7% KaNgwane 285 345 409 601 685 140.4% KwaNdebele 342 394 511 673 859 151.2% KwaZula 226 267 361 516 541 139.4% Lebowa 258 425 501 690 902 151.5% QwaGwa 544 724 650 1,075 1,281 135.5% TBVC (Total) 316 384 507 635 712 125.3% Transkei* 244 289 363 431 486 99.2% Bophuthatswana 384 462 684 883 1,066 177.6% Venda 353 451 603 827 927 162.6% Ciskei 446 579 729 912 941 111.0% All AfricanDepartments 345 404 511 677 789 128.7% The official data for Bophuthatswanaand Transkeido not provide a breakdown into primary and secondary phases; these figures were estimates by BDSA on the basis of teacher deployment.
Page 39 Annex VI
Primary Per Capita Expenditure in HoA Compared to Other Departments 1987/8 and 1991/2 (Rands)
1987/8 1991/2
DEPARTMENT Rands per Ratio of HoA Rands per Ratio of HoA Capita to Dept. Capita to Dept.
Assemmbly 1, 962 n/a 3, 298 n/a
Delegates 1,382 1.4:1 2, 482 1.3:1 Representatives 890 2.2:1 2, 070 1.6:1 African Depts. 345 5.7:1 789 4.2:1
QwaQwa 544 3.6:1 1, 281 2.6:1
Kwazulu 226 8.7:1 541 6.1:1
Transkei 244 8.0:1 486 6.8:1
Page 40