The Western Cape provincial budget crunch continues unabated, and the limits on the educational department, under significant strain from low-income population influx from the Eastern Cape, have been recognised by the department.

The national government covered only 64% of the 2023 public sector wage bill, leaving a R537 million gap, while cuts amounting to R179.4 million exacerbated the situation, creating a total funding deficit of R716.4 million.

The province’s schools are also buckling under the weight of growing demand. As of early December, 97% of applicants for Grade 1 and 8 placements in 2025 had been accommodated, but 3,698 learners remained unplaced, with another 4,000 late applications expected in January. Maynier warned that some placements might not be finalized until the end of the first term, as “Western Cape schools are full.”

Efforts to mitigate the damage included freezing 21% of public service vacancies, slashing R2.5 billion from non-personnel budgets, curbing substitute teacher appointments, and converting contract posts to permanent ones. Yet even these measures left a projected R3.8 billion deficit over the three year budget cycle.

The provincial Treasury stepped in with R250 million and reallocated R600 million from infrastructure funds. However, these resources are earmarked for pressing projects such as building nine new schools and 265 classrooms to accommodate rising learner numbers in 2025. Investments in special needs facilities and other essential infrastructure remain priorities.

The conflict over the termination of over 2 000 teachers’ jobs has been lost by the unions, but there is one big question that remains.

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Who will be cut?

As we wrote earlier this year, the inter-party and inter-governmental competition over resources presents a unique opportunity to reform the department and strip away the dead wood.

The article linked at the head of this section provides more detail of the decline, but recent headlines showing South Africans falling to the bottom of international performance ratings should tell us unequivically what we already know - our teachers suck.

Yet the unions and the left will consistently tell us that all we need to do is throw more money and more teaching positions at the problem. But that is because they are stupid, and have a vested interest in extracting institutional patronage from the system.

Bigger classrooms with quality teachersa re better than smaller classrooms with terrible teachers, and the majority of harm to our quality of education is done by incompetent parasites who continue to draw lifetime salaries while turning schools into glorified daytime prisons.

The evidence is unequivocal - the simplest way to improve education outcomes is to get rid of the worst teachers. The best thing that could have come of this restructuring would have been a purge of the 5% worst teachers in every school, with a graduated weighting of the retrenchment according to school performance, allowing worst-off schools to absorb some of the merely average teachers from the better schools.

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The evidence

The 5% I quoted is not an entirely arbitrary figure - it was proposed by Stanford public education specialist Eric Hanuschek, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth from his his left-wing colleagues. But even left-wing research bodies in America recognise the truth of his remarks.

It is of course widely recognised that blind layoffs reduce the quality of student outcomes, and many choose to lean on this as the bedrock of their argument, as Stellenbosch left-wing academic Jonathan Jansen did recently on Cape Talk. And naturally, this will impact the poorer students hardest, as most policies do.

But this is equally true of the positive effects - the worst teachers tend to be at the worst schools, which tend to be the poorest. But that simply means they need the purge more than everyone else. Many young student teachers are waiting in the wings to fill these posts, and many struggle to find posts.

But in case anyone thinks my position is too radical, you should see what Colombia Business School research found - that having an 80% turnover after two years is the optimum way of achieving quality teachers. Of course, this was a programming model based on large-scale data, but this sort of turnover should be the main anchor for our thinking - if we are not churning through teachers at a regular rate, we will end up with mere benchwarmers and babysitters.

Another key contextualising observation is that the quality of a teacher does not generally improve much with experience. It turns out that after the first two years or so, teachers have acquired all the experience-based improvement they are likely to get.

So if you want to rescue our schools, rescue them from the teachers who are wrecking them, and say no to these crybully union parasites.

Will David Maynier commit to the correct path, or will he simply be terminating contracts by lot?

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