Technical Vocational Education and Training colleges in SA are treated as stepchildren by higher education authorities.
As such, universities are prioritised when the government allocates funding to tertiary institutions, leaving TVET colleges worst off.
This is according to PE College’s Jessie Sarrahwitz-Figg, who told DA MP Chantel King on Thursday this needed to change.
Sarrahwitz-Figg said she felt the TVET sector was the “stepchild of the minister of higher education”.
“We feel that universities get too much funding if you compare their infrastructure,” she said.
“NSFAS is an issue in the TVET sector and it is a problem throughout the higher education sector — there are students in my institution who registered in 2020 but are still awaiting funding.
“I have requested that someone from NSFAS comes to our institution to speak to students and listen to them, they never even responded to our communication,” she said.
King visited PE College and Nelson Mandela University (NMU) as part of her nationwide oversight visit.
Sarrahwitz-Figg said they had to reprioritise their budget as well.
“I took some of the sports budget, travel budget as well as the choir budget, but up until now the government has not given us a special Covid-19 budget,” she said.
Asked about online teaching and learning, Sarrahwitz-Figg, said: “My students do not have laptops and we do not have a budget to purchase these. .
“I found a budget to purchase for staff but that was from savings over the years.”
NMU executive director Mike Monaghan said they had worked hard to reprioritise the budget and the creation of an academic recovery plan.
“The department [of higher education] did allocate us two Covid-19 recovery grants, the one was for the academic recovery plan and the other one was the campus readiness plan.
“Those were two plans that needed a lot of budget reprioritisation.
“What we have done is look internally and we have looked at how to redirect those costs to things like student data, staff data to work remotely,” he said.
Monaghan said 65% of NMU students had migrated to online learning, 27% fell under the hybrid learning criteria as they came to campus from time to time, and 8% continued to study online and go to campus for practicals.
The hybrid learning is supported by the loaning of laptops, zero-rated websites and the provision of data.
King said she was impressed with what she saw at NMU.
She will meet NSFAS chief executive Andile Nongogo to discuss what she found at tertiary institutions.
HeraldLIVE