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South Africa: DA Wants Probe of FET Skills 'Failure'
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
8 July 2008
Posted to the web 8 July 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
EDUCATION Minister Naledi Pandor urgently needed to investigate what had gone wrong with the government's plan to use the further education and training (FET) colleges to help make inroads into SA's lack of technical skills and meet the targets of the government's Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of SA (Asgi-SA), the Democratic Alliance (DA) said yesterday.
More than a third (38%) of the 25000 FET college students who enrolled last year for the education department's much-vaunted new National Certificate in vocational subjects (NCV) dropped out before writing their final exams, and only half the rest passed, according to department statistics.
President Thabo Mbeki and Pandor have promoted the 11 new FET college programmes, which students can follow to obtain an NCV, as the answer to SA's desperate need for technical skills.
The programmes have also been promoted as the key to achieving the Asgi-SA targets of halving poverty and unemployment by 2014, from 2004's levels of one-third of South African society .
The high dropout and failure rates were coupled with the government's failure to recruit FET college students in the numbers it had promised, said DA labour spokeswoman Anchen Dreyer.
"The intention of Jipsa (the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition) was to increase the number of students enrolled in FET institutions from 400000 to 1-million over three years . However, the Jipsa annual report issued in March 2007 showed that there had been an increase in admissions of a minuscule 25000 students -- 4% of the target, with only two years left to catch up," Dreyer said.
"In the most recent annual report, the question of the number of new enrolments was ignored completely and we have not been told how many new students were taken on."
The education department's deputy director-general responsible for the FET colleges, Penny Vinjevold, said all 50 colleges had introduced academic support programmes for students .
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The pass rates for these subjects are very low -- 32,5% for mathematics literacy and 21,2% for mathematics, according to the department's statistics.
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