The Heher Commission has said that TVET College students are in desperate need of support. They further said that TVET Colleges are severely underfunded.
In response to this, the Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, said:
We have paid a lot of attention to TVET Colleges. In 2009, when the colleges were transferred to my department, we doubled the intake by 2013. We introduced NSFAS for the first time in the TVET system. The problem is there is not enough colleges and capacity.
The reason this issue has not yet been dealt with? Well, Nzimande explained that government budget has not allowed them to do so.
South Africa is said to have over 700 000 students at TVET students and over 1,1 million at Universities. The Minister has said that we should be ideally be having three times more students at TVET Colleges than we have at Universities because this is what the rest of the world looks like.
"Part of the reason we are having so much pressure at universities, is because we do not have an option of TVET Colleges," said Nzimande.
Here's what the Minister recommended:
We want to have an apprenticeship based TVET system where a student does not go to college first to be admitted, but gets taken in a workplace and be an apprentice and then once or twice a week attend a college for theory. This is the system I'd like to see in SA.
He went on to say that there is an agreement in place which will see them now start pushing for this to happen which will then prompt government to release more funds to expand the TVET system.
The Minister believes that "TVET Colleges are our future".
Most of the TVET Colleges are continuing with their programmes at the moment and according to Minister Nzimande, here there are problems, they are being attended to but he says most of that system is now stable.
We have challenges in the TVET system, but we are addressing them, probably not at the speed we need to be addressing them. That is why I am saying we need more resources to be able to assist us to deal with the challenges in the sector.
Universities have also started introducing a teaching qualification specifically geared towards teaching within the TVET system.
