5 Year Strategic Plan 2005/06 - Department of Education

Table 26 mirrors provincial aggregate values for Learner-Educator Ratios according to
combined, primary and secondary schools. It is clear that all the LER are below one
educator for 40 learners, sustaining the compliance with the South African Schools Act,
which stipulates 40:1 for primary and 35:1 for secondary schools. Because these are
provincial aggregates it does not mean that there are no individual institutions for which
the LER is above 40.
As Table 26 indicates the Learner Educator Ratio (LER) for 2004 was 33.99 considering
state-paid educators in public schools. Comparing the LER with those of 2003, viz.
32.42% and 33.99%, it is observed that for the state-paid educator situation there is a
marginal improvement whilst for all educators (both state- and privately paid) the
situation worsened.
Many of these schools are primary schools and more than 83% are from the former DET
schools. This is an unusual phenomenon as the Post Provisioning Model is based on the
equal distribution of educator posts, thus all schools should have an LER lower than
40:1. This may be due to incorrect reporting from schools in the survey forms, or as a
result of ambiguity in questions in the survey form. The main contributing factor is that as
a result of the survey being conducted on the 10 th school day, many schools
experienced an influx of learners that was not anticipated in the previous year, resulting
in higher numbers of learners.
p a r t C : b a c k g r o u n d i n f o r m a t i o n
Table 26: Learner : Educator Ratio by Level
Level 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Combined
36.90
39.22 38.39 37.69 34.09 34.58 36.18
School
Primary
School
34.98 35.16 33.22 31.41 32.22 33.83 32.70
Secondary
School
30.06 30.86 30.88 27.96 28.19 29.62 31.40
Public
Ordinary
35.76 35.66 34.78 31.88 32.42 33.99 34.45
Tables 27 and 28, illustrate the LER of public ordinary schools by its former department
and by quintiles, i.e. its placement on the resource targeting list for school funding that
uses a poverty index to rank schools. Table 46 shows that LERs for four ex-Departments
and it range from 35.99 to 27.24 (excluding SGB paid educators) in 2004. The LER for
ECDE’s new schools reflects continuing improvement from 1999 for both inclusion and
exclusion of SGB paid educators. For the whole province LER have improved and
stabilized in the last 5 years as the table shows. The slight increase in the LER in 2004
can be contributed to the current moratorium on the appointment of any new staff in the
system. Although the ECDE has the biggest percentage of poor people in the country, it
had the best LER after the implementation of the 2004 Post Provisioning. The freezing
of any appointments meant that due to natural attrition of educators, the LER would
slightly increase as educators leave the system.
Table 27: Learner - Educator Ratio by ex-Department (Public Ordinary Schools)
Ex-Dept 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Ciskei 29.41 29.17 26.88 27.51 26.31 27.24 29.78
Transkei 38.29 38.14 36.63 35.04 33.71 35.67 38.04
HOR 28.62 34.02 30.17 33.13 33.79 33.21 36.49
CED 28.04 33.75 30.78 32.99 33.38 33.33 37.78
New 43.24 38.90 34.03 33.16 34.18 35.99 38.43
Total 33.52 34.79 31.698 32.36 32.27 33.08 36.67
5 Year ECDoE Strategic Plan for 2005/06 to 2009/10. March 2006 Page 82
5 Year ECDoE Strategic Plan for 2005-06 to 2009-10. 21 F (4)Page 78