I want to tell you two stories - both of them are actually happy stories, one of them is that very recently I went to visit a school recently. And MEC Gabru (who introduced me) is right, I am a teacher by profession and when I am no longer a Premier I might decide to be a teacher again. I recently visited the Hyacinth Primary School in Lentegeur.

I mention this because most times the media reports on all the negative things that happen in schools, teachers are not doing this, pupils are not doing that, high levels of vandalism and so on. A young girl had phoned my office and asked to interview the Premier. She was speaking to my P.A. and I heard as I walked past, coming from a meeting, that this young girl wanted to speak to me about an assignment they were given about vandalism. So I told my P.A. to put her through to me.

And when I visited the school and I loved the idea that all the people involved in the school - the teachers, principal, parents and students were all putting their heads together to work out how to make sure that when they go off on a weekend, no-one can vandalise their school.

And that is probably for me one of the biggest lessons. You see, government has to think about what children are learning, what teachers need - what the budget is for education and so on. But when it gets into the classroom, we have no control over it. And for many of us here, often the fact that one child in the family is educated or has some education, changes the life of the whole family.

I was the first one in my family to have any education after standard 8. I am the eldest and in fact I actually dropped out of school in standard 8. I left school to find a job, but I had the most wonderful principal and teachers and very soon I went back to school. Part of that was to do with the fact that I wanted life to be better for us. For me, and also for my family.

So I think you young people have a very big responsibility to get an education. When you see someone driving by in a fancy car with fancy tyres and we think that is what we want. But this is not the big thing, the big thing in the world is what you can do to make life better for yourself and for your parents.

My second story is actually about a 90-year old lady in the Eastern Cape who graduated at the end of having taken up adult basic education. She was one of 14000 people presented with an award last year and she said: "I never dreamt it would be possible until I started my classes this year. This has changed my life and I feel very good about it." For us, we would think that she is almost at the end of her life, but she felt she could change it. And that, for me, is the principle of the Learning Cape - that it is able to do many things. It is able to change the lives of young people and stretch across the spectrum and change the lives of old people.

Because it is important that we grow whole people, young people who can stand the test of time anywhere in the world. Young people who can make informed decisions about whether they will go into the hospitality industry, engineering or become businesspeople. Minister Gabru makes the point that you can be teachers first and then go into other professional streams. I think that would be wonderful, because we are actually running out of teachers.

In 2004, and I think this information my be useful to teachers, when we assumed power in the Western Cape the budget for education in the Province stood at five billion rand. Four years down the line, it is 9.02 billion rand. Just last year after a decision was taken at the national conference that education and health must be funded to the maximum, we increased the budget by 1.4 billion. That shows government's commitment to wanting to make sure that education works properly.

FET colleges over the period of 2004 to 2007, the number of students registered went from 4000 to around 23 000, so the point I'm making is that we are providing the resources and the facilities for people to use and people ARE using them. That to me means that we are probably doing some things right.

But there are problems and there are challenges. One of the big problems for me as head of this Province - and you must also think about how we can resolve this - is that about 30% of the pupils who enroll in grade 1, do not make it through to grade 12. This means that we have a lot of young, uneducated people in our province.

They drop out for a range of reasons and we need to look at why - some of it is to do with teenage pregnancy, some of it is to do with other choices young men and women make and some of it is to do with not being able to afford to go to school. So I would like you (the community) to help find a solution, to keep young people at school. This is besides when you see young people in school uniform in a shop at 11 in the morning, when I think the shopkeeper should just throw you out of his shop so that you go back to school.

How do we work that one out? The other thing is vandalism at schools. WE pay a lot of money to fix schools. Part of that is that the whole community who live around the school do not feel about the school, the way we feel about the school. We won't break into the school on the weekend, because we believe in our school.

So how do we get everyone, community police forum, neighbours to care about our schools. How do we get gangsters to leave our schools alone?

When I was young, my challenges were very different. I didn't have mxit where I could go and watch funny things (cellphones were not invented yet). We did not have computers where you can go and download positive things to help you grow but also very negative things. My pressure was what do I do when I leave school? Or can I play hopscotch better than my friends. Today scholars do not even know what hopscotch is.

Your challenges are bigger - very recently young boys were taking pictures of themselves having sexual intercourse with young girls on their cellphones. Those are difficult thing and officials are sitting in government, teachers are in classrooms so you young people are the ones who must help us to protect yourselves. I think you probably would have better answers than us on the various areas that affect your lives.

Let me tell you if I were asked today who should be the privileged class in society, I would say it must be young people - our children must be the privileged class. We want it to be better for you and we are putting in place all the things that need to be in place so that you can achieve. But to get there we need you to drive and be passionate about becoming young leaders of tomorrow.

I want to thank the teachers here today who could have been shopping or spending time with their families. Thank you for your dedication and commitment to helping us change the quality of life for all who live in this Province. And to all the young people sitting here in your beautiful school uniforms, thank you for being here and I hope you are able to tell your teachers what you want to be doing when you graduate at the end of grade 12.

Please enjoy the rest of the festival and keep learning.