How the Western Cape Education Department secretively exempted over 400 schools from contract teacher post cuts

By Seelan Naidoo

In August 2024, the WCED announced its plan to cut 2,407 contract teacher posts from public ordinary schools in the Western Cape. According to MEC David Maynier, this was necessary to avoid a deficit in the department due to national fiscal pressure. These heavy cuts came into effect on December 31, 2024.

The stakes in this matter are extremely high for the thousands of contract teachers who lost their jobs and for the hundreds of thousands of learners that will be negatively affected thereby. This is a major public issue in the Western Cape which has implications for basic education departments in other provinces that are also grappling with fiscal pressures.

The initial legal bid by the Special Action Committee (SAC) in December 2024 was to urgently interdict the WCED’s teacher cuts ex ante and as a whole. This bid did not convince the judge of its urgency which then also sunk the possibility of an ex-ante stay of execution. With the cuts already made by the WCED, the matter will continue in the High Court on a different basis. 

The data analysis

The legal shift is from an emphasis on trying to stop the cuts from happening at all, to an ex post facto examination of the cuts from a constitutional perspective in terms of their rationality, fairness, equitability, and the extent to which they support the redress of historical deficits in basic education. Such an examination is crucial especially if it is assumed that the cutting of teacher posts is unavoidable.

Data, analysis, and communication are necessary if the affected teachers, schools, parents, and learners are to make sense of the WCED’s drastic actions. However, the WCED has covered its hand from the public by providing anorexic data and even withholding material information.

In September 2024, in response to an earlier question in the House from MPL Khalid Sayed (ANC Leader of the Opposition in the Western Cape provincial legislature), the WCED tabled details of the teacher cuts in the legislature. This report included a 21-page list of public schools, their location, their allocations of WCED-funded posts in 2024, and how many teacher contract posts would be cut from each school.

This list was only made available by the WCED after pressure was applied by the opposition. However, the list contains the scantiest data which is insufficient for a reliable examination of the rationality and fairness of what the WCED has done to public schooling.

Additional data thus had to be brought in to enable a proper analysis. To this end I cross-referenced the WCED list of post cuts with data from the latest publicly available DBE schools master list (Department of Basic Education, 2023). The additional data fields and their analysis have produced many reliable and noteworthy findings that I will share in a series of articles over the coming weeks.

Key finding

The most surprising finding that I want to highlight in this article is the discovery that 437 public ordinary schools were not subjected to any cuts of contract teacher posts.

Of a total of 1,468 public schools in the Western Cape, 1,031 schools (70%) collectively suffered all 2,407 cuts of contract teacher posts and these were declared by the WCED in the legislature. 

However, 437 schools (30%) had no such cuts, and this was not declared in the WCED’s list or in its submissions to the legislature, nor was it communicated publicly.

The table below summarises the distribution of schools by quintile, categorised into schools that were selected by the WCED for the cuts, and schools that were so secretively exempted from these cuts.

The substantial number of schools that were exempted surprised everyone I have shared this finding with. It is counterintuitive and begs many pertinent questions. Why did over 400 schools evade these cuts altogether? Which schools got away with it? Why those schools? Why were over 100 of the wealthiest quintile five schools spared from these cuts while others were not? How much of the WCED’s rhetoric can we trust?

There may or may not be rational explanations for the WCED’s actions on ordinary public schools. However, an inescapable question remains either way: why did Maynier and the WCED hide this information from the legislature and from the affected publics – the teachers, learners, and parents - that together number in the millions of citizens in the Western Cape?

It seems to me, prima facie, that the WCED has committed a serious form of perjury by withholding material information from the legislature and from the public.

* Dr Seelan Naidoo is principal associate at Public Ethos Consulting. He holds a master's in Decision-making, Knowledge and Values from Stellenbosch University, and a PhD in Organisation Studies and Cultural Theory from the University of St Gallen. He is an associated researcher of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. He writes here in his personal capacity.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.