Minister of Education, Prof Kader Asmal, spoke on behalf of the cluster.

Questions by the media and replies from the Ministers:
(Q) What is the cost of this human resource development programme?
(A) Minister Asmal: There is no ballpark figure yet. Each Department (that is, Education, Labour, Arts, Science and Technology) will work out its contribution to the cost. In addition there is also the contribution from the skills levy, which the SETAs will work out.

(Q) Minister Asmal announced that 80 000 learnerships would have been completed by 2005. What sort of learnerships are these?
(A) Minister Asmal: this figure may seem ambitious but it is realistic. Such learnerships are aimed at combining learning with practice. Business Trust and the Department of Labour are already working together and in June a batch of 3000 learnerships will be launched.

(Q) What is the status of the labour law amendments proposed last year?
(A) Minister Mdladlana: The amendments have been tabled at Nedlac, where negotiations are taking place. Negotiations at bilateral level are at a critical stage. Out of 80 amendments there are now 7 areas in which there is maturity: Section 189, probation periods, bargaining councils, powers to vary hours of work, Section 197, Sunday work and independent contractors. An agreement is beginning to emerge and some reformulation and redrafting is taking place.

(Q) Minister Ngubane is one of three cabinet ministers responsible for a report on HIV/AIDS. A draft of this report was sent to panelists for comment on 29 August. Although they were given two weeks to comment the report was only submitted to Cabinet on January 18. Why this delay? And why have panelists not received a copy of the report presented to Cabinet?
(A) Minister Ngubane: There is nothing in this matter. It is a very complex process. The initial report was merely to synthesise discussions, it does not even touch on protocols. It is senseless to publish incomplete work and in case the work is a continuum.
Minister Asmal: Particularly in the case of highly skilled workers, HIV/AIDS is a consideration. The Human Resource Development Strategy does consider the impact of AIDS on skills.

(Q) How do you manage the people who are outside the system? These would include people who have failed matric or who are unemployed.
Minister Asmal: The earning capacity of Matriculants, even those who failed, is still greater than those without matric. Also, with only 10% of matriculants going on to higher education the matric exam needs to be reviewed since it does not seem to serve a proper purpose.

(Q) Minister Asmal said that 100 schools would be targeted to become institutions of excellence. Would this not result in some elitism?
(A) Minister Asmal: Targeting is about making political choices. Targeting is appropriate: the targeted school acts as a beacon for the schools around it. It also creates a cohort of people who meet the need of information technology.

(Q) Minister Asmal said that the review of matric as we know it will take place in 2005. What happens until then?
(A) Minister Asmal: This review needs to be done by a high status body, so that teachers can be brought into this process. The Council of Education Ministers will discuss how this review is to be done at the next meeting. This has to be started now and not in 2005.

(Q) Is there a special human resource programme to get people back into the mainstream?
(A) One way of getting people back into the mainstream is through the National Skills Development Strategy, meant to draw people into the job market.

(Q) There was a comment that the Ministers seemed confident that about what needs to be achieved.

(Q) How will the Department deal with the attrition of teachers due to HIV/AIDS?
(A) Minister Asmal: The estimations on educators with HIV/AIDS should not be minimised or exaggerated. It is important that planning takes into account the possible impact of AIDS.

(Q) What incentives are being offered to attract teachers to work in rural areas or townships?
(A) Minister Asmal: This is a provincial function but even other countries have found it difficult to provide incentives. The Minister did think that it is appropriate to think about financial incentives.

(Q) The fire at Lenasia drew attention to the work of the inspectorates. How will their performance be improved?
(A) Minister Mdladlana: He agreed that this was indeed an important question. In that case the supervisor sent an inexperienced inspector to the site. Since then a blitz has been through all the provinces.

Appendix 1
MEDIA BRIEFING BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, 13 February 2001

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
Ministers, members of the diplomatic corps present at this briefing, members of the media, Ladies and Gentlemen, this briefing is not about education, as you know. Today I speak as a Minister having a joint responsibility with my colleague, the Minister of Labour, for driving the Human Resource Development Strategy of the government.

In his State of the Nation Address last week, the President referred to how our country is proceeding step by step from its painful past, and briefly described the past to which he was referring. One of the major characteristics of that past is the underdevelopment of the most important resource of our country, our people. The deliberate de-skilling and underdevelopment of the majority of our people was a major strategy to make our country one which was racially divided, a country of masters and servants, of endemic and wide spread poverty and gross imbalances in levels of development and the distribution of wealth, income and opportunity, as described by the President.

Human Resource Development at the centre of developments away from our past.

If it is true that the main mechanism adopted by the past regime to keep our people racially divided was education and training, then surely any attempt to reverse that past must lie firmly in the deliberate reversal of its effects in and through education and training. In this regard the President acknowledged in his speech "welcome progress is being made in the efforts to improve the quality of education, including the provision of infrastructure, consolidating the culture of learning and teaching, and introducing Adult Basic Education".

While acknowledging this, the President noted that much more needs to be done to improve our skills base. We begin from a very low skills base, which is skewed not only in racial and gender terms, but also in the provision of skills that are critical for a competitive economy. If we do not address this skills base very urgently, we cannot and will not be able to achieve our national goals of economic growth, fighting poverty, and entrenching our democracy.

Therefore the adoption of a Human Resource Development Strategy by the government recently, is perhaps one of the most important steps in our fight against the effects of underdevelopment from our past, to which the President referred. As the President said, this strategy ' will enable us to launch an accelerated skills development programme for those areas that are critical to a more competitive economy'.

The Minister of Labour and I are still making plans for the public launch of the strategy. It is at this launch that we will unveil all the elements of the strategy in detail. In this briefing we will only concentrate on a few aspects of the strategy, especially those that were referred to by the President in his speech.

But before I take you through these elements, let me emphasise the importance of a human resource strategy for our country. This strategy comes at a time when the Departments of Education and Labour are taking important actions in particular, which needs such a strategy as their point of anchor. The Department of Labour recently unveiled a skills development plan as adopted by Cabinet. In education we are almost ready with a national plan for higher education, which I will be taking to Cabinet on the 28 February this year. I do not want to say much about the higher education plan at this stage, except to say that everything about it responds to the Human Resource Strategy we are discussing today.

The Basic Framework underpinning our strategy
Human Resource Development Strategy: Firstly, our strategy is built on a framework, which recognises the importance of ongoing interaction between the supply side, the demand side, as well as the innovation side of human resource development, with a careful balance between all of them. It is therefore a movement away from the now discredited manpower planning model, as we realise that short of magical and mystical powers of Sangomas throwing bones, we cannot predict with any precision what skills will be required by the economy in the future. Ours is therefore an approach that balances all elements of human resource development, supply, demand and innovation, underpinned by basic education. Such a balance, the strategy recognises, is a function of political choices to be made by Cabinet through its appropriate structures, and cannot be left on chance.

In other words, Cabinet needs to be able to take certain decisions to intervene in the development of our human resources, in order to direct the agencies responsible for supply and demand, to meet certain objectives. Therefore our strategy places decision making around human resource development firmly in the hands of Cabinet.

In order to make informed decisions, Cabinet needs reliable information, based on research and analysis. For this purpose Cabinet has approved the appointment of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) as a body to support the Human Resource Development Strategy through research and information gathering.

Five Strategic Objectives
As I said, I will not give many details at this stage. But I do want to mention that our strategy identifies five strategic objectives for the government and the country for the next twenty years in the area of HRD.
These are:

* The improvement of the foundations for human development, by which we are referring to matters such as literacy, health and nutrition, early childhood development, and the quality of general education, etc.

* The improvement of the supply of high quality skills, especially scarce skills, which are more responsive to social and economic needs, in which we include the increase in participation rates in both Further Education and Training and Higher Education, especially in identified areas of need, the promotion of learning in areas of scarcity through targeted bursary schemes and scholarships, the increase in scientific innovation, and the identification and recruitment of skills from other countries where necessary

* The increase in employer participation in lifelong learning
* Supporting employment growth and
* Linking all these four elements.

Priorities for 2001/2002
1.A Focus on Scarce Skills
Within these objectives the government has identified five priority areas for 2001/2002. In his speech the President again referred to one of these. The President said that 'immigration laws and procedures will be reviewed urgently to enable us to attract skills into our country". This is one aspect that will be looked into within the government's prioritisation of the identification and the development of scarce skills in the economy. Our immigration policies still make it difficult to attract skills in areas where these are scarce in our own country.

I must say that the import of skills to address shortages is something done by many countries, even those that are said to be developed. The UK for example is out to recruit our teachers and nurses to meet their needs. Our country cannot be an exception in this regard. We therefore have to look at whether we can make it easier for people who bring skills we need in the country to immigrate.

I can immediately think of a number of academics who are providing critical services in our higher education institutions, who are still experiencing difficulties in immigration processes.

The government is therefore going to review our immigration policies and practices to make it possible for us to attract such skills. I must immediately stress that here we are more interested in skills that we as a country have identified as necessary, and have agreed that their import will empower both the economy and the production of those skills in our own country.

1.1 Identifying Scarce Skills
In order to identify where scarce but urgently needed skills are in the economy, all our Sector Education and Training Authorities together with relevant government Departments will be tasked with an urgent responsibility to identify scarce skills in their sectors. Already some work has been done in this regard, and we can already say that in the area of information technology and related fields, technology in general, and all skills related to the knowledge economy, in particular software engineering.

1.2 Creating Centres of Excellence
Obviously when these are identified we will have to make certain interventions to ensure their accelerated production. In this regard the government will identify specific institutions in the higher education sector that will be capacitated to produce such skills in an accelerated manner.

As part of our national plan for higher education for example, we will identify an institution, or institutions that will be developed into centres of excellence when it comes to Information and Communication Technology. I am pleased to say that the private sector has already shown active interest in this concept, and will join us in supporting this venture. Not only will we identify such institutions in higher education, but also within the Further Education and Training Band. We have already started work with the Business Trust to accelerate the identification and the development of certain FET institutions. Within that programme we will soon identify those that have to respond to the urgent production of identified scarce skills.

1.3 A firm and strong Maths and Science Base
Most of these skills require a very firm Mathematics and Science base at schools level. The numbers of students who are matriculating with Mathematics and Science are far too low to provide an adequate base. The government is therefore going to embark on a vigorous intervention strategy to improve participation and success rates in Mathematics and Science. Details of the intervention are provided in a separate sheet of paper given to you. You will see that it also involves targeting certain institutions to make them centres of excellence for Maths, Science, and Technology.

1.4 Learnerships to promote intermediate scarce skills.
The National Skills Development Strategy puts a target of 80000 completed learnerships by 2005. The Departments of Labour and Education are therefore going to identify learners and providers for the provision of up to 3000 learnerships in this year. These shall be funded through the skills development levy and other sources of funding. The President referred to learnerships in his speech, especially as regards to tourism. These are meant to kick start the learnership programme, but we will ensure that some learnership is developed in the identified areas of need and shortage.

2. Other priorities
I have spent some time on the matter of scarce skills, since direct reference is made to it in the President speech. However there are 4 other priorities for 2001/2002. These are:

* A focus on the Public Service to improve delivery

* The development of skills to support SMMEs

* Learnerships and

* ABET and Literacy

Relevant Departments will announce details of programmes around these areas when they unfold their own programmes.

Conclusion.
As I said earlier, the idea today was just to give you some sense of what our Human Resource Development Programme is all about. We will launch the programme very soon, and you will be provided with copies of the programme. My two colleagues will now elaborate on specific matters as referred to in the President's speech, including the matter of research and innovation, and some elements of the labour market.