Next year's number of teaching posts in the province has been announced, but the Grahamstown District Education Department is yet find out how many will be filled here.

Next year's number of teaching posts in the province has been announced, but the Grahamstown District Education Department is yet find out how many will be filled here.

This month Education MEC Mandla Makupula tabled the number of teaching posts for the 2014 financial year, also announcing that the department would cut more than 5 000 posts.

This means that the province will have 55 796 posts in 2014 compared to 60 820 this year.

Makupula explained that the cuts are based on factors like teacher budgets and affordability projections for the department's medium-term expenditure framework.

Provincial spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima told Grocott's Mail on Tuesday 15 October that the department was still busy with consultation processes in order to break down the posts for each district.

"This process will be finished by the financial year which [ends] in March next year. Our consultation teams are going around to schools in order to get the numbers," Mtima explained.

The provision of posts goes according to the numbers schools submit to the department, he said.

"Posts are declared from schools according to the number of learners in that school, it is not about how big the building of the school is but about how big the number of the learners in that particular school is.

"For now the posts have not been allocated per district yet, that will happen after the consultation is done."

Grahamstown district director Amos Fetsha was unavailable for comment at the time of publishing.

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