Johannesburg - The Gauteng Provincial Government has budgeted R6 billion to build new schools in high pressure communities. The Premier of Gauteng, Panyaza Lesufi, announced the news on Monday during his speech of the 2023 State of Province Address (Sopa) in the Gauteng Legislature in Johannesburg.
Lesufi indicated that the education system would collapse if nothing was done due to overcrowding which was exacerbated by high levels of in-migration.
He said the allocated funds would focus on building more schools to avoid the issues of unplaced learners of Grades 1 and 8 learners.
“We have received a major boost of R1.5 billion from the National Treasury to finally demolish mobile and asbestos schools. We will rebuild 18 new schools in Gauteng,” he said.
He mentioned that they would be going to the market to solicit proposals from private companies to build schools and won’t compromise on BEE and Township beneficiation.
The premier highlighted that for the first time, they would access resources from private sector financial institutions to fund infrastructure projects upfront, after which they would be built, maintained and transferred to them.
To give our learners a competitive edge and to prepare them for the post-matric world, he said they would continue to roll out Schools of Specialisation (SOS).
“To date we have 21 Schools of Specialisation and by the end of this administration, we would have 35 of these schools,” he said.
Meanwhile, Lesufi said he was pleased with the increasing number of children registered at the Early Childhood Development (ECD) sites.
“As part of the process to bolster our education system, we are now ready to build an ECD of the future, starting with Tshwane (in Soshanguve). We are committed to rolling out ECDs of the future across the five corridors.
“The ECD of the future will have classrooms with indoor splash pools, ICT centres, a water recycling area and mini sports areas. Coding and Robotics will gradually be introduced into the curriculum to meet the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR),” he said.
Furthermore, Lesufi congratulated the class of 2022 for their pass rate of 84.4 %.
“This simply means that out of every ten learners that wrote matric in Gauteng, eight passed. Of the eight, six passed with a Bachelor pass,” he said.
He added that they were contributing 43 298 distinctions to the national education system, “of these, 20 769 come from township schools. This is a monumental achievement!”
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