Notes for Keynote Address to Education, Training and Development Practices Sector Education and Training Authority

17 September 2008, Birchwood Hotel, Gauteng

Introduction

Thank you very much for inviting me as the guest speaker at this important gala dinner held as part of your 3rd National Conference.

Your SETA brings together constituencies that are very vital in the achievement of our goals to transcend the apartheid state and build a society based on realising the potential of each and every single South African. You bring together government, labour, education institutions from early childhood development through to higher education, public schools and their governing bodies, libraries, research organisations and political parties, amongst others.

Given the mandate of the ETDP SETA, for us it should act as an important support pillar, resource and a training institution for education and training. The centrality of this SETA lies in the fact that it supports a sector that is supposed to produce the required educational foundations and skills for the entire economy.

We also wish to appreciate the work that is being done in all the sectors that are gathered here, in trying to support the building of a learning nation.

Contextualising the role of the ETDP SETA

The ETDP SETA should locate its work within three important imperatives in South African society today.

Firstly, the biggest challenge facing our society is that of building a developmental state that is driving an agenda to fight unemployment and poverty, and indeed the HIV/AIDS scourge; things that are threatening to undo all the achievements we have made during the 14 years of our democracy:

• Building a developmental means eradicating all the features of the apartheid state
• A state that is capable of intervening in the economy so that our economy is able to serve the interests of the overwhelming majority of our people, especially the workers and the poor.
• A state that is capable to tempering with the logic of the capitalist market, so that we reverse logic of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer
• A state that will lead a process of ensuring that our economy is liberated from being dominated by big, white owned business monopolies that are stifling small business and co-operatives

But we cannot build a developmental state without the necessary education that forms the foundations of skills development in society. This is need both inside the state, in order to have the necessary skilled people who understand and can drive a developmental agenda, and the provision of skills in broader society, in the private sector, the public sector and in communities. Therefore the role of this SETA is to act as a strong pillar to achieve education for development.

Secondly, your SETA must locate itself within the renewed emphasis likely to be placed on education as envisaged by the ANC Polokwane resolutions conference. Amongst other things this resolution calls for placing education as a societal concern and not just a branch or department of government, as well as a renewed commitment to free and compulsory education, NOW including the first tertiary qualification.

This is a very important commitment which calls for serious effort to be put into provision for requisite skills to support an implementation of such a resolution. Therefore the question that needs to be posed is how is this SETA re-positioning itself to make a decisive contribution in this regard? This includes:

• Quality of teacher education
• Increased support for skills development in Early Childhood Development (ECD). For instance many ECD practitioners are not adequately supported with the necessary training and development to be able to lay the most important foundation for education and training.
• The kinds of skills generally needed in our education and training sector, and how to accelerate these
• Making use of, and empowering, communities as places for education. A lot of education takes place in communities, whether it be informal or formal, in daily gatherings of various sectors of our communities, and how to tap onto some of these in order to create a better skills base. For instance a specific question in this regard is the relationship between this SETA and Community Development Workers (CDWs)
• Relating to education and training taking place within political parties, and rethinking the kind of support needed by these parties in order to contribute to broader education and skills development
• Specific training programmes to supporting literacy and numeracy education in our schools

Rethinking the role of SETAs

Thirdly, locating the task of this SETA within the context of re-thinking the role of SETA’s within our society, and frankly engaging with some of the challenges facing the SETAs:

• The type and quality of cadres sent to participate in SETA boards and structures
• Liberating the SETAs from the politics of tenders and consultants, some of whom formed overnight in order secure tenders from the SETAs
• Why are some SETA CEOs earning above R3 million rand, like Ivor Blumenthal, who also has the guts to attack the labour movement when striking for better wages and working conditions? Should this money not be better used to address the many pressing education and training challenges facing our country?
• Arising out of the above, working in the SETA should be seen as a public service rather than a corporate-type appointment

Integrated education and training strategy

A key challenge that we had already identified prior to 1994 was the need to build an integrated education and training strategy, and that includes the following:

• Linking education to training, whilst not reducing education simply to the needs of an untransformed and, in many respects, a colonial economy
• Education is not only maths, science and technology, but also psychology and other social skills given the many social challenges that we face eg. The social stresses caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic both personally, at work and in communities; as well as the crime and violence besetting our communities, not least our schools
• Continuing lack of skills so vital to our economy, like artisans; an issue that is closely linked to the state of our FETs.
• Locating the ETDP SETA in such a way that it does not seek to replace the education department, but acts as a vital resource to this
• Continuing problems in co-ordinating of work between the education and labour departments

Changing the current economic growth path

Key features of the current growth path are colonial or at best neo-colonial:

• Delinked growth and development
• Favouring a rich small, predominantly white elite, joined by a tiny layer of the black rich
• Reproducing middle class advantage
• Not creating enough jobs
• High levels of poverty
• A hopelessly narrow model of BEE
• Suffocating SMMEs and co-operatives

In conclusion, we need to develop skills to change this growth path if we are to achieve social development for South African citizens. This means that SETAs have to locate themselves within this overarching framework of our developmental objectives.

Wishing you a successful conference!