Sadtu rejects WCED’s containment plan

The Western Cape Education Department (WCED) has blamed the national government’s budget cut for plans to freeze posts and the extra work that teachers in ordinary public and special schools will face in the 2024 academic year.

This is after SA Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) rejected the department's cost containment measures it announced to schools via a circular.

According to the circular signed by WCED head Brent Walters, provision will not be made for substitute posts, except for maternity leave applications.

“Any Post Level (PL) 1 posts not filled via the conversion process by March 31, 2024 can only be filled by following a formal recruitment and selection process. To support schools, special vacancy lists will be issued in addition to the vacancy lists reflected in Recruitment and Selection Notice 0001/2023, dated October 31, 2023.

“PL 1 posts will not be provided for acting appointments against vacant substantive School Management Team (SMT) posts, except for principal posts. The filling of all office-based public service posts (Head Office and district offices) will be frozen and only critical posts will be activated upon approval,” the circular read.

According to Walters, the measures were necessary to stabilise the basket of affordable posts for 2024 within cost containment measures.

This will come into effect from April 1 next year at schools.

Sadtu’s provincial secretary Sibongile Kwazi said the union rejected the cost containment measures as spelt out in the circular.

“Although labour was consulted regarding cost containment measures during the medium-term expenditure framework consultations on the basket of posts for 2024, Sadtu never agreed on three of the areas where the employer seeks to cut costs, such as that substitutes will only be available for educators who are on maternity leave. It has been the practice for schools within WCED to get a substitute educator whenever there is an educator who is on sick leave for 15 consecutive days. The circular is also quiet about educators who are on ... incapacity leave and ill-health retirement. This will imply that poor working-class schools who are unable to afford an SGB-employed substitute will have big, unmanageable classes, which spells a disaster for the academic outcome,” said Kwazi.

She said in some cases there was more than one vacancy of SMT at schools, and this meant that schools would bear the burden of bigger class sizes which would compromise education outcomes.

“Sadtu also disagrees with filling all Post Level 1 vacancies through a formal vacancy list. With the current backlog in the filling of posts, this will place a bigger burden on the Recruitment and Selection Directorate. We still insist that all Post Level 1 posts are better filled through Section 6A of the Employment of Educators Act,” said Kwazi.

Education MEC David Maynier said the actions were due to a R716.4 million cut in its budget from the National Treasury.

“We will have to cut R143.5m from the #BackOnTrack budget this year, which unfortunately will put an end to our plans to expand the number of and resources for learners in grades 8 and 10, and the parent programme,” he said.

“The cuts we face to infrastructure spending are twofold. The national government has slashed our conditional grants related to infrastructure, which has the obvious impact of reducing our infrastructure budget directly. The net impact is a R248m cut to our spending on school infrastructure, which very obviously will limit our ability to deliver new schools and maintain existing ones,” he said.

Cape Times