School Community Integration Pilot Project - Department of Education

A comparative analysis of education expenditure in Eastern Cape schools – November 2004
relative cuts in the provincial allocation to education and the current and future
funding pressures set out at the start of this report, there is a clear case for
reprioritising resources.
• Pursuit of a low LER in the province has achieved the goal of relatively
favourable post provisioning in most districts of the province. The time has
now come to reprioritise resources in favour of other vital areas of the
education process.
Personnel, recurrent and capital expenditure
• The large number of small schools in the province create a pressure to
increase the educator establishment due to their low LERs.
• The post provisioning model allocates posts especially to small schools,
schools with a large number of grades and combined schools, creating
pressure for a large establishment in the context of the Eastern Cape.
• The province has been able to meet national norms in the provision of learner
support materials (LSM). It is however below the average per capita spending
on non-personnel non-capital expenditure per capita and well below draft per
capita norms for NPNC.
• Capital expenditure on school infrastructure has increased rapidly in recent
years. Based on available figures the Eastern Cape will be able to meet its
target of eliminating infrastructure backlogs over the next ten years.
Realigning schools for quality education
• There is a strong case for realigning the public school system to address
these issues by implementing a full primary (grades R to 7) and full secondary
(grades 8 to 12) system throughout the province. A number of educational
benefits would result from this realignment of the schooling system.
• The change of combined schools to primary schools would reduce the very
wide age spread within these schools, an important consideration with the
prevalence of over aged learners in schools. This would make management
of these schools easier and contribute to social cohesion within the school.
• The change of combined schools to secondary schools would also reduce
pressure on classroom space in a system that already suffers from acute
over-crowding and backlogs. 7 rather than 9 grades would be using the same
number of classrooms.
• In senior secondary schools currently, educators are teaching 10 to 12
subjects over only three grades in schools of acute classroom shortage. The
practical result is often that each grade is taught one subject at a time in an
overcrowded classroom, especially in small schools, with the educator moving
between classrooms for different subjects. As the educator is only teaching a
subject to three grades, high proportions of educator time are wasted through
a low period load. This explains the seemingly paradoxical findings that LERs
in senior secondary schools are very low, while educators report teaching
very large class sizes of 50 or more in secondary schools.
• Moving to a full secondary school system would enable much better utilisation
of educators in the former Transkei. Larger secondary schools would be able
to ‘cluster’ resources, offering a wider subject choice and achieving
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