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Cape Town - The Democratic Alliance has called for an urgent investigation into further education and training colleges, saying only four percent of a targeted number of students have enrolled and only 23 percent of these pass.
As a key part of Cabinet's plans to improve the skills levels of South African workers, FET colleges must deliver on their targets or the unemployment crisis will continue to worsen, DA spokesperson Anchen Dreyer said on Monday.
In the face of the "dismal failure" of these colleges to meet the objectives set for them under JIPSA (Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition) Education Minister Naledi Pandor needed to urgently investigate these colleges to find out where they were going wrong, and put in place a rescue plan.
Since February last year, R2bn had been spent on recapitalising FET colleges, with the objective of properly equipping them to drive government's plan to increase the number of artisans trained by 2010 to 50 000 in terms of JIPSA.
This would have plugged many gaps in the workforce, stimulated economic growth, created many more jobs and given the economy far more capacity to weather the current storm, she said.
"However, these plans have been going wrong. It was revealed [on Sunday] that only 23 percent of the students who enrolled for the 11 new FET programmes passed all of the subjects required."
This was bad enough on its own, without taking into account further evidence of how badly these colleges had failed in their admissions targets.
The intention of JIPSA was to increase the number of students enrolled in FET institutions from 400 000 to one million over three years.
However, the JIPSA annual report issued in March 2007 showed that there had been an increase in admissions of a miniscule 25,000 students - four percent of the target, with only two years left to catch up.
"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," she said.
If the FET colleges were only enrolling four percent of the target number, and only 23 percent of those who are enrolled passed, then a vast amount of money was being wasted and it was imperative to get to the bottom of why this was happening.
It appeared there were a number of problems with poorly prepared and under-motivated teachers.
If this was the case, the Minister needed to scale back the project to ensure that the necessary quality of teaching could be delivered.
The low number of enrolments also suggested the need for an investigation into how the colleges were publicised and how easily accessible they were, Dreyer said.
- Sapa