Mission of the Department of Education:
To provide leadership in the construction of a South African education and training system for the 21st century through:
- Making our provincial system work by making co-operative government work.
- Breaking the back of illiteracy among adults and youths in five years.
- Developing schools as centres of community life.
- Ending conditions of physical degradation in South African schools. o Developing the professional quality of our teaching force.
- Ensuring the success of active learning through outcomes-based education.
- Creating a vibrant further education and training system to equip youth and adults to meet the social and economic needs of the 21st century.
- Building a rational, seamless higher education system that grasps the intellectual and professional challenges facing South Africans in the 21st century.
- Dealing urgently and purposefully with the HIV/AIDS emergency in and through the education and training system.