Reversing austerity: How Budget 3.0 can restore educational integrity and infrastructure in South Africa.

Daily Maverick

15-05-2025

More than 23,000 posts in education departments have been cut, and now our classrooms are paying the price for austerity.
Budget 3.0 will be tabled on 21 May 2025 — a historic moment for our nation's democracy, which had until now failed to meaningfully challenge many of the National Treasury's regressive decisions.
While we welcome the ruling that declared the proposed fiscal framework that contained a regressive VAT increase as unlawful, it is only the beginning. We must remain steadfast in our efforts to hold the Treasury accountable to all its constitutional obligations. The new Budget cannot continue on an austere path, which systematically dismantles the public infrastructure and services upon which the most vulnerable depend.
Nowhere is the damage of austerity more visible — or more devastating — than in our social services, particularly education, where the effects are especially acute. The constitutional right to basic education — an immediately realisable right — has been eroded by years of budget cuts, staffing reductions, and chronic underfunding. Politicians often repeat the refrain that the government must 'trim the fat', but what has been slashed over the past decade is not excess — it is the very muscle of our public education system.
These cuts have gutted the core of teaching and learning: fewer teachers, overcrowded classrooms, inadequate infrastructure, and limited support services. The result is a generation of learners denied not just quality education, but the tools to fully realise their potential in a democratic society.
Austerity is driving teachers out of the classroom
Perhaps the most devastating impact has been on our teaching workforce. As we mark Workers' Month, we are confronted with the catastrophic reality of plummeting headcounts in the public education sector. Education departments' most recent annual reports show that 477,774 posts were occupied in the 2023/24 financial year. By the end of January 2025, this had decreased to 454,640. This means that in one financial year, more than 23,000 — almost 5% — of warm bodies in the public education workforce were decimated. When including funded but vacant positions, the number rises to more than 46,000 — nearly 8.5% of the workforce stripped away.
Those who remain do so under increasingly arduous conditions: overcrowded classrooms, chronic shortages of materials, and mounting administrative burdens. Many teachers now work far beyond their contracted hours, effectively subsidising the education system with their unpaid labour. Furthermore, the Treasury's R11-billion retirement incentive for public sector workers will probably accelerate this exodus by encouraging a wave of early retirements without a parallel plan to fill the gaps. This is not a profession in decline by choice — teachers want to teach. Austerity has created a crisis where experienced educators are leaving the profession in droves, while fewer young people see teaching as a viable career path.
Unfunded mandates, unrealised rights
It is deeply contradictory for the government to be cutting education posts while at the same time increasing its obligations to learners. Since the Bela Bill was signed into law in 2024, Grade R has become a legal obligation. Yet no corresponding funding has been allocated to support its implementation — there is no budget to increase teacher headcounts or equip schools with the infrastructure and resources needed to accommodate this expanded intake.
Parliament should not pass budgets with unfunded mandates — they undermine the rule of law and put constitutional rights at risk. The underfunding of Grade R is a clear and urgent example.
Budget 3.0 must end the infrastructure crisis in schools
The physical infrastructure of our schools tells an equally troubling story. It has been 12 years and counting for the government to eradicate pit latrines from all schools, which were officially declared illegal under the Norms and Standards for School Infrastructure. Despite legal guarantees, many students still attend schools without adequate sanitation, a reliable water supply, or safe buildings.
In 2023, the Department of Basic Education estimated that it would need approximately R42-billion each year to eliminate all backlogs and have well-functioning school infrastructure in all public schools by 2030. Even if current spending plans are protected against the VAT shortfall, the government will spend an annual average of R17.6-billion on school infrastructure over the next three years, less than half the required amount.
Even more troubling is that the government amended the Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure to remove critical deadlines for addressing these backlogs. This shift actively retrogresses against established frameworks to safeguard the right to education as an immediately realisable one.
Deadlines are essential for driving implementation, enabling proper planning, and securing ring-fenced funding. By scrapping them, the government has weakened accountability and signalled a retreat from its constitutional duties. While the rest of the world invests in equipping learners for a digital and knowledge-based future, South Africa's education system is still denied the minimum resources it requires to equip youth to actively participate and contribute to our future.
We stopped the VAT hike — now we must reverse the cuts
The victory against VAT increases has demonstrated that organised resistance to austerity can succeed. However, we must build on this momentum to demand not just the prevention of further cuts, but the restoration of what has been lost and investment in what should be.
Our education system needs immediate, substantial increases in funding for teacher salaries and recruitment, dignified and safe school infrastructure, learning materials, and support services. Even Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has conceded to what we have long argued: austerity has failed to achieve its goal of reducing national debt. Instead, it has shifted the burden on to poor and working-class communities through degraded public services while economic growth stagnates.
If spending cuts have failed to deliver the promised stability or growth, then we must ask: why are we still sacrificing our teachers and our children's future at the altar of austerity? DM
Mahfouz Raffee is a researcher at Equal Education. Matshidiso Lencoasa is a budget analyst at SECTION27. Both organisations form part of the Budget Justice Coalition.
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