In a bid to avert a growing crisis in the supply of schoolteachers, the government is to introduce bursaries for students training to enter the profession.
About 20 000 of the country’s 350 000 public school teachers leave the system every year, but universities annually produce only 6 000 new teachers.
The number of black school-ÂÂleavers choosing to become teachers is especially low, with dire consequences for mother-tongue instruction in African languages.
The bursary plan is a central pillar of the long-awaited policy framework for teacher training, which the ministry of education released for comment last week. Bursaries will be tied to service contracts, providing the double incentive for prospective students of fully funded university studies and guaranteed employment on graduation.
The new policy framework notes the under-supply of new teachers, remarking that shortages are most evident in scarce skills areas such as maths, science and technology, languages and arts, and economic and management sciences. In addition, teachers are in short supply in the foundation (grades one, two and three) and intermediate phases (grades four, five and six).
With black student teachers, ”the situation is especially serious in the foundation phase, where learners require teachers with mother-tongue competence”, the document says. ”Of the 6 000 new teachers likely to graduate in 2006, fewer than 500 will be competent to teach in African languages” in grades one, two and three.
Nearly 27 400 students are enrolled this year in undergraduate teacher training programmes, said Wally Morrow, former dean of education at Nelson Mandela Metropole University — but only 4,9% of these are African-language students training towards foundation phase teaching. Morrow chaired the ministerial committee on teacher education, whose report last year strongly recommended teacher bursaries as a recruitment tool.
Neville Alexander, director of the University of Cape Town’s Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa, said bursaries would provide a major incentive, but university education faculties are not sufficiently geared up for training African-language foundation phase teachers.
”We need special courses on mother tongue-based bilingual education, because people are not being taught to teach properly. There are people in most provinces who can do this. Some are at universities, some in NGOs, but they tend to be marginalised in education faculties, teaching only a small proportion of teacher education courses.”
The shortage of foundation phase teachers is one explanation for large class sizes in these grades, even in cities, he said. ”And it poses a major challenge for the education minister’s aim that schools provide six years of mother tongue-based instruction. It’s going to be very difficult to achieve that.”
Alexander proposes an advocacy campaign to increase the status of lower-grade teachers. ”The elitist nature of education in post-apartheid South Africa, where everyone wants to be a university professor, means there’s a stigma about primary school teaching. Yet even the Afrikaner apartheid ideologues placed a great premium on education at all levels.”
Yusef Waghid, professor of education at Stellenbosch University, said foundation phase training is not taken seriously at universities. The incorporation of teacher education colleges into universities over the past few years had led to a meagre output of foundation phase teachers.
This is also one reason for the overall under-supply of new teachers, said Mary Metcalfe, head of the Wits school of education. In 1994 102 colleges were distributed across the country, so that most students could attend a college reasonably near their home, Metcalfe said.
”The move of teacher education to the higher education sector has located it in institutions far from homes of a high proportion of students.” This has dramatically increased the costs of training to be a teacher, both because of higher fees at universities and accommodation expenses.
In turn, this has led to a higher proportion of urban-based students, who tend to be reluctant to teach in rural areas.
Bursaries tied to service contracts will have a beneficial impact on both quality and quantity, Metcalfe said. ”Because more young people will be attracted to apply, we can be more selective in who we admit. Bursaries will also provide a mechanism to encourage applications in particular sectors, such as the foundation phase, and in particular locations, such as rural areas.”