Budget Speech 2025

Paying salaries constitute 76 per cent of provincial education budgets. This means that only R24 out of every R100 of their budget is left for funding school infrastructure, meals for learners from poor backgrounds, and stationery and textbooks, amongst others.

Our learner-teacher ratios remain higher than we would like, meaning that we still need more teachers in classrooms.

To prevent compensation of employees from crowding out other equally important areas of spending, R19.1 billion is added over the medium term to keep approximately 11 000 teachers in classrooms.

The foundation to building the next generation of citizens who contribute economically and socially to this great nation is early childhood development.

Despite this, the subsidy for ECD has not increased from the 2019 level of R17 per day, per child.

To remedy this, an additional R10 billion over the medium term is allocated to increase the subsidy to R24 per day per child. The extra funding will also support increased access to ECD for approximately 700 000 more children, up to the age of four years old.