Andy Duffy
NEARLY 17 000 state school teachers have applied for voluntary retrenchment, most of them senior experienced staff disenchanted with government’s education shake-up.
More than 13 000 of the voluntary severance applications come from teachers in Gauteng (severance requests from 9% of its teachers), the Western Cape (requests from 17% of its teachers) and KwaZulu-Natal. The requests have to be approved or blocked by the provinces’ education departments by year-end.
The figures are the first the national education department has received from the provinces since teacher redeployment and cutbacks started earlier this year.
The staff shake up is central to government’s drive to redress past imbalances in education funding – proposals agreed by the Education Ministry and teacher unions in February.
Department officials say the numbers suggest few teachers are accepting redeployment. But the resignations will allow new posts to be created in areas deemed understaffed.
The door has also been left open to re-employ those leaving on temporary contracts, running for up to a year. “We don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner,” Roelf du Prees, the department’s deputy director general of human resources, says.
The cost of the departures has still to be quantified. But Du Preez says an average severance package will be more than R376 000 – most of it paid by the state pension fund.
“The losses are mainly among the older people because [the package] is more viable for them,” Du Preez says. “With the option of redeployment one can expect this kind of reaction.”
The largest teachers’ union, the National Association of Professional Teachers of South Africa, says the level of retrenchment requests underlines the impracticality of teacher redeployment. Many of those going are setting up in private education. “Redeployment has not been taken to by teachers because it’s impractical,” executive director Huw Davies says. “We’re disturbed at the loss of a high level of expertise.”
Gauteng, the Western Cape, the Free State and the Northern Cape are trying to marry the severance requests with staff cuts forced by government’s drive to equalise teacher/pupil ratios. Staffing requirements mean matching the two is not assured.
More than 6 800 of Gauteng’s 48 000 teaching posts are to be shed by December 1997 – 3 300 are supposed to go by the end of this year. The Western Cape is expected to shed 12 000 of its 34 200 teachers – 6 000 by the end of next month.
A task team of education department and state expenditure officials will go to the provinces next month to cost the resignations. The take-up of redeployment offers, and the prospect of creating new posts with the funds freed up by the resignations, will also be assessed.
Davies says it is unlikely new adequately trained teachers can be found to go into understaffed areas, even if such new posts were to be created. Government has undertaken to cover the cost of severance packages only for the four provinces deemed to have excess staff.
Much of the cash is being sought from foreign donors. Du Preez says the UK, US, Germany, the European Union and the Republic of China have all shown interest in funding the programme. But it is not clear whether the donors want to fund severance packages or other parts of the education programme.
Gauteng education department chief co- ordinator for right-sizing Dennis Molaba says there is broad support from the province’s 1 952 schools for its three-year reshape. There has been opposition from the coloured community, with schools in Eldorado Park refusing to establish committees to draw up right-sizing plans.
But he says it is unlikely reallocating staff resources will be completed by 1998, which could force compulsory retrenchments.
The Western Cape’s education and cultural affairs MEC, Martha Olckers, says many of the voluntary severance applicants applied “because they don’t want to be redeployed somewhere haywire.”