Pretoria - Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande has rejected calls for the scrapping of Services Sector Education and Training Authorities, known as SETAs.
"The SETAs system is here to stay and will remain a central cog of our skills development machinery," Nzimande said at the National Skills Summit on Thursday.
He added that the calls to have them scrapped were based on the assumption that Further Education and Training (FET) colleges and SETAs perform the same functions, which is not the case.
While colleges are education and training providers, SETAs have a legal duty to disburse 80 percent of the skills development and levy funds.
"They are constituted in as governance structures to represent a partnership between government, business and labour to direct skills training in various sectors. The SETAs also work at different levels of the training hierarchy and are intermediaries between business and training institutions using organised networks for workplace training," he explained.
He, however, acknowledged that there were challenges facing some of the SETAs in terms of performance and efficiency.
The department is at an advanced stage of dealing with these problems. "In the next few weeks, I will finalise the redesign of the SETAs landscape, which is aimed at the alignment of skills development according to sectoral needs," Nzimande said.
