Short-Changing the Children: A DA analysis of Auditor-General’s reports of the 9 provincial education departments

STATEMENT BY EDDIE TRENT MP AND GEORGE BOINAMO MP

DA SPOKESPEOPLE ON PUBLIC ACCOUNTS AND EDUCATION

Short-Changing the Children: A DA analysis of Auditor-General’s reports of the 9 provincial education departments

Release, immediate: Tuesday 13 March, 2007

Auditor-General’s reports of the nine provincial education departments go a long way to explaining why so many South African schools continue to produce dismal results, year after year, despite many new policies and countless rescue plans.

Provincial education departments have a central part to play in getting South Africa’s dysfunctional schools working better. But these reports make it clear that in most provinces, departments are too weak and disorganised, and officials are too preoccupied with their own interests, for these departments to be able to assist, support and monitor these schools in any meaningful way.

At the most basic level, provincial departments need to ensure that schools have all the textbooks, teachers and facilities they need to operate at full capacity. However, the evidence in these reports – supported by evidence from DA school visits – is that schools still regularly go for months without textbooks and materials.

In Limpopo, for example, textbooks had not been delivered five months into the school year, and were being stored in warehouses with no security and leaking roofs. In many other provinces, there were problems with the timeous delivery of teaching resources and provision of teacher training.

The primary school feeding scheme, on which many South African children depend for their only meal of the day, was especially plagued with problems of incapacity and corruption.

Among other things, the Auditor-General found evidence of food prepared in unsanitary conditions, food that was past its expiry date and food that was not delivered at all.

The most common problem with this programme was a failure by departments to demand proper records of expenditure from schools and the organisations providing the food. For example, in the Northern Cape:

• There were no attendance registers for food preparers.
• Payslips were not properly authorised.
• Schools had not submitted statistics and prescribed menus.
• Subsistence and travelling claims were paid without claim forms.

Situations like this often made it impossible for the Auditor-General to evaluate whether money had been spent on the purposes intended, and create enormous potential for corruption.

Provincial departments are required to ensure that schools are properly run, that they spend their budgets properly, and that teachers teach for the required time and earn their salaries.

But it is clear from these reports that many departments virtually ignore their oversight responsibilities. Money is often poured into schools with no consideration for whether the money is spent properly. In the Northern Cape, for example, several schools simply failed to submit financial statements at all, but had money transferred to them none-the-less.

There is ample evidence to show that schools that produce bad results do so for one key reason: teachers do not spend enough time teaching. Provinces hold the salary purse strings. But it seems that they generally do very little to insist that teachers earn their pay. For example:

• In the Eastern Cape, R120 million had been paid out for various allowances, but the validity of many of these payments could not be verified.
• In Limpopo, employees did not sign payrolls, or signed on behalf of their colleagues.
• In Gauteng, some attendance registers could not be produced for audit.
• In several provinces, inadequate on non-existent leave records made it impossible to verify the correctness of leave payments.

One can presume from this information that salaries and benefits are being paid to many teachers who either do not exist or who do not turn up to teach. In the Eastern Cape, the Auditor-General put a specific figure to this, finding that the department was paying 46 ghost workers nearly R4 million a year.

One has to ask, if the Auditor-General was able to identify these missing workers with such relative ease, why provincial governments have not been able to do the same.

A widespread lack of management capability in provincial departments has had various direct consequences for education.

One particular example involved the loss of a large donation from the European Union for school construction in 2002, after the Eastern Cape deviated from its own business plan. During the 2005/06 year the province was still struggling to settle amounts owed for this project.

The provincial government faced such severe financial problems that it obtained a bank overdraft of R1.4 million during the year, blatantly ignoring the provincial finance MEC’s refusal to grant the department permission for an overdraft facility.

Numerous examples were found of irregular tendering procedures for school building projects. In KwaZulu-Natal, a forensic audit of all procurement activities between 1st April 2001 and March 2005 was under way at the time of the audit. In Mpumalanga, the Auditor-General found various instances where the adjudication committee had amended the qualifying criteria for bidders after the tender date, and payments amounting to R1.8 million which had been made to suppliers who were not registered for VAT

The adult education programme appears to be particularly plagued with management problems. In Mpumalanga, for example, potential “significant” fraud was identified in relation to the allocation of large amounts of the adult education budget to unspecified “payments for other programmes”.

Getting South Africa’s non-performing schools to do better requires provincial education departments to dramatically improve their capacity to manage all the resources available to them in order to support these schools, to monitor their performance and help them to comply with the basic requirements of good teaching.

They need to do a good deal better than they are doing now in order to properly meet this obligation, but until they do, our children will continue to lose out on the education they are entitled to.

Download supporting documents (AG06final.doc)