Jimmy and Louise Warner, both 53, are about to start new careers. He will work from their Rondebosch home for Cape estate agents Steer & Co, and she will help with the typing.
In Eldorado Park, Johannesurg, Anthony Swartz (50) is also starting afresh, going into a business which he doesn’t want to talk about yet.
There’s no great rush to start work. The Warners have a lump sum in their bank account which runs well into seven figures; Swartz is sitting on more than R1-million.
The money is their “reward” for leaving the state school system. It is a deal which thousands of state school teachers are buying into.
Voluntary retrenchment is central to the government’s drive to equalise education resources – a plan agreed to with teaching unions last May. Provinces such as Gauteng and the Western Cape are judged to be over- endowed, so their funds have been cut. The offer to thousands of their teachers is to be redeployed (usually to another province) or to take the money (which includes their pension) and go. Most are taking the money.
Warner was a principal, his wife a grade one teacher, and together they had chalked up 50 years’ teaching experience before they quit last September. When Swartz goes at the end of this month, he will have been in the profession for 29 years, the last 11 as a principal.
The department always expected the severance programme to appeal mainly to senior staff, given their unwillingness to relocate, and the size of their pay-offs.
For the profession, however, the exodus – in the face of the reshaping, the drive to lift the matric performance and the launch next year of a new curriculum – has set alarm bells ringing.
“It’s a national tragedy. It has left us with a critical shortage of people with experience at a senior level,” South African Teachers’ Association director Mike Reeler says.
The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union says voluntary severance was only supposed to be a tool to further redeployment. But losing staff now seems to be the Education Department’s sole aim. “The packages are running totally counter to what they’re supposed to achieve,” national media officer Kate Skinner says. “They were never supposed to be a right, but it seems anyone, even those desperately needed, can get the package.”
The Warners’ reasons aren’t the same as Swartz’s motives. Jimmy Warner was just tired. He had been looking for a way out for three years, and he and his wife were among the first in the queue when the Western Cape, one of the hardest hit by funding cuts, announced its severance programme.
“I found myself under a lot of pressure,” Warner says. “The most difficult thing was the attitude of the parents. You can’t discipline and run a school unless you’ve got support from parents. I was always bogged down in silly disciplinary things, wondering who was going to phone next to give me a rocket.
“The package they offered was very attractive. I’ve got enough years ahead of me to start a new career.”
In the profession since he was 16, Warner spent the last six years as principal at Blouberg Ridge Primary in Table View. The school had less than 100 pupils when he started and close to 600 when he left. Warner recruited and trained the 17 staff, and led fund-raising attempts for books and equipment.
There was no opposition to his severance application and he knows of no one else who was turned down when they asked to leave. Three of Warner’s staff took the severance package, and ten of the 40 staff at the nearby Table View primary school also went.
Since September about 700 principals from the province’s 1 600 schools have gone, many followed by their deputies. In total, the Western Cape had to shed 6 000 teaching staff by the end of last month. Another 6 000 are supposed to go before the end of this year.
“No one in their right mind would want to be redeployed,” Warner says, adding that he never had a problem with the department itself.
Swartz’s departure, however, stems almost entirely from his problems with the Gauteng Education Department.
“It is very difficult for us older members of the profession to come to grips with the manner the department conducts itself,” he says.
“These people are supposed to give guidance and they can’t because their appointments are questionable, they’re young and they know nothing. It’s very frustrating.”
His school, Willow Crescent Secondary in Eldorado Park, had 48 staff and 1 100 pupils – a ratio of of 23:1 which prevents the school teaching the full curriculum, he adds. It was still deemed to be overstaffed. Swartz says his school escaped lightly – just he and one other staff member are going. At nearby Coronationville Secondary School, however, the principal, two deputies and most heads of department are leaving.
“I’m sure government in time will realise they’ve made a very serious mistake. The profession is losing its most competent and dedicated people, ” Swartz says.
“I’ve made my contribution. I just want to get out.”