National School of Government – Costing

The School of Government proposal aims to create a training institute for civil servants, which would train all new recruits and existing civil servants, run an annual summer school for DGs and DDGs, and provide a year-long elite cadet training programme for 1% of new recruits. The initial proposal was to train all civil servants from all departments at a cost of R7.4 billion, using the 1% training levy of the government salary bill of R4.6 billion; however, this would still leave a shortfall of R2.8 billion. The study proposes that departments such as Basic Education, Health, Defence, SAPS, Correctional Services, DIRCO and Parliament be excluded from the training. Further cost savings could be achieved through i) a staggered approach of training 40% of civil servants per year instead of 60%, ii) a higher learner–instructor ratio, and iii) omitting the very expensive cadet-style training. The proposal contains two high-risk assumptions: i) existing civil servants would provide most of the training, free of charge but at an opportunity cost of about R600 million per year, and ii) the current funding of approximately R420 million for the various government-aligned SETAs would be shifted to the school. It is worth noting that the University of Cape Town’s total annual budget was R3.8 billion at the time of the study.