Des Erasmus
Early childhood development (ECD) will receive an additional R12.8 billion over the next three years, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said on Wednesday while delivering his budget speech.
This would expand services to an extra 300 000 children while maintaining a per-child, per-day subsidy of R24, he said.
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Godongwana said the extra funding forms part of wider education allocations, with spending on education the largest component of consolidated expenditure at 23.7% over the medium term.
Basic education will receive R22.7 billion for carry-through costs announced in May 2025, with ECD receiving the majority of those funds, he said.
He said that R9.9 billion would support “employee compensation and other pressures in education”.
He said increased allocations would align the National School Nutrition Programme to food inflation to keep meals flowing to over 9.9 million learners in almost 20 000 schools.
Godongwana said additional allocations to the provincial equitable share included R342 million to “progressively equalise Grade R teacher pay”, alongside other items such as funding for the presidential employment initiative.
He said basic education was a pillar of the social wage, and that it, together with health and social protection, would make up 70.3% of the social wage in 2026/27, supporting 13.6 million school children.
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Regarding skills and training, he said government was reforming the national skills ecosystem.
The skills development levy, Sector Education and Training Authorities and the National Skills Fund “have not yielded the outcomes we expected”, he said.
He said government would explore reorganising training through “a dual-training skills acquisition system” and look at how institutions could equip job-seekers and graduates with artisanal skills.
Addressing long-term higher education infrastructure needs, he called for proposals under the Budget Facility for Infrastructure that could include “the development of new tertiary institutions like the proposed Ekurhuleni University and student accommodation”.
INSIDE EDUCATION
