redundancies
THE Education Ministry is struggling to determine whether its drive to reshape state schooling has achieved much more than lose South Africa thousands of experienced state teachers and unnerve those who remain.
Pressure is growing on the ministry -even from its own officials – to rethink the programme, which is supposed to redeploy teachers from “overstaffed” state schools to understaffed schools, or offer voluntary retrenchments.
The ministry does not know how many, if any, teachers have been redeployed, or how many teachers the provinces have on their books.
But nearly 12 000 teachers have been given the voluntary severance package, and another 6 000 teachers have applied for it. Thousands more are expected to apply this year.
The average payout for each is more than R66 000, before pensions, which have landed some with seven-figure handshakes.
Less than seven months after the reshape began, ministry officials have started a fresh investigation into teaching resources. The programme will be revised, depending on the findings.
Acting Director General of Education Dr Ihron Rensburg has also floated the prospect of forced retrenchments – putting the ministry on collision course with the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) and the National Professional Teachers’ Association of South Africa (Naptosa).
“We’re heading for a major showdown,” Sadtu general secretary Thulas Nxesi says. “It’s chaos. It’s being implemented without a clear plan. Provincial departments have not had the right statistics so they don’t know where people should be redeployed or how many teachers they’ve got.
“We’re not ready to continue the debate on rationalisation. The only solution is to go back to the drawing board.”
Ministry officials want to meet the unions later this month to find common ground. Nxesi is planning meetings across the country next month for Sadtu’s 160 000 members to determine strategy, including strike action. Naptosa’s tones are more guarded, but suggest any attempt to cut numbers will be hard fought.
The staff shake-up is central to the government’s attempts to reallocate teaching resources more equitably between provinces – a process due to run until 2 000. Provinces such as Gauteng and the Western Cape, where schools are judged overstaffed, have suffered heavy budget cuts. Others have had budgets increased.
The ministry this week said the process was “on track”, class sizes in disadvantaged schools were falling and many promotion posts had been created – KwaZulu-Natal recently advertised around 7 000 such posts. “The large number of requests for voluntary severance packages indicates this was a realistic approach to provide an alternative to redeployment,” it noted in a statement.
But deputy director general of human resources Roelf du Preez says the ministry has no profile yet of the teachers taking the voluntary severance package, or of redeployment numbers. The unions say they know of no redeployment.
Du Preez says the lack of clarity follows the decision to devolve implementation to the provinces, who devolved it further to individual school right-sizing committees. “The provinces are just busy processing the things,” he adds.