More than half the country’s teachers intend leaving the profession. And as low morale, job dissatisfaction, HIV/Aids and premature mortality devastate public schools, the number of teachers has declined over the past seven years. By 2002/03, 21 000 teachers (about 6%) were leaving the system annually.
The Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) released these findings in Cape Town late last month. The figures appear in a comprehensive study of teachers in public schools that the ELRC commissioned two years ago ‘following worrying anecdotal reports that indicated that educators seem to be leaving the education profession in large numbers.”
The study consists of seven reports the ELRC commissioned from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the Medical Research Council and the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Mobile Task Team on the Impact of HIV/Aids on Education.
The study surveyed 21 358 teachers in more than 1 700 randomly selected schools. In 2003/04, there were 368 548 public-school teachers.
Of 55% who intended to leave the profession, 25% considered leaving ‘from time to time” and nearly 30% considered it ‘very often”.
Likeliest to leave, the study found, are non-Africans, men, secondary-school teachers, those aged 25 to 49 years, the best-qualified teachers, those in the medium- to high-income group, and teachers of technology, economics and management, and natural sciences. HIV-negative teachers are more likely than HIV-positive employees to want to leave.
Reasons teachers gave for wanting to quit were inadequate remuneration, increased workload, lack of career development and professional recognition, dissatisfaction with work policies, job insecurity, violence in schools, and lack of choice about where they work.
The study measured the impact of HIV/Aids via a ‘nationally representative sample of 17 088” teachers who gave an oral fluid or blood specimen for testing, the ELRC said. Nearly 13% tested positive. ‘African educators were most likely to be HIV-positive,” said Olive Shisana, executive director of the HSRC. ‘They were also most likely to be part of low economic status and more likely to be placed in rural areas without their families.”
HIV prevalence is highest among 25- to 34-year-olds (21%), followed by 35- to 44-year-olds (13% tested positive). More than a fifth (22%) of the HIV-positive group need immediate anti-retroviral therapy – about 10 000 of all teachers.
This means that in about 10 years almost a quarter of experienced teachers will have died of Aids, said Dave Balt, president of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa). And ‘because of an only slightly lower prevalence in the 25 to 29 age group, there will not be sufficient teachers in the system to provide education for all the learners. This situation is exacerbated in rural areas where the prevalence is much higher …
‘Naptosa urges the government to increase the minimum CD4 count from 200 to the international standard of 350 in order to qualify for anti-retroviral treatment,” Balt said. That would qualify 23 500 teachers for treatment.
‘We know precisely the size and nature of the HIV/Aids threat,” announced the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu). ‘Now is the time for strategising and action … Illness, including HIV, leads to higher absenteeism and is associated with low morale. Educators are crying out for support and treatment.”
About 4 000 teachers died of Aids last year, the study found. ‘This translates to us as one educator lost every two hours,” Sadtu vice-president Nosi Mjekua said.
The study found that the health of teachers ‘is apparently poorer than that of the general population”: 10,6% had been hospitalised in the preceding 12 months, as opposed to the 7% observed generally in the Nelson Mandela/HSRC study of HIV/Aids.
‘The real value of the study is its identification of trouble spots where we can target our intervention,” said acting Director General of Education Duncan Hindle.
Among the recommendations the study makes are that the Department of Education, with the support of unions, should: restructure remuneration packages; reduce workloads and manage teachers’ job stress; improve resources for poorer schools, especially African schools; provide psychosocial support for teachers; introduce a comprehensive workplace health-care programme; and implement HIV/Aids-prevention and anti-retroviral programmes for teachers.
The ELRC consists of the national and provincial departments of education, Sadtu, Naptosa, the Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysersunie and the National Teachers’ Union of South Africa.