Teachers spend less than half the working week actually teaching, with administrative tasks taking up more than half their time. And more than three-quarters of teachers say their workload has increased ”a lot” since 2000, with 90% ascribing this increase to the demands of the new curriculum.
This emerges from a report prepared by the Human Sciences Research Council for the Educator Labour Relations Council, released this week. The report follows studies earlier this year, also commissioned by the council, on teacher supply and demand. Those studies found that more than half of teachers wanted to leave the profession, citing low job satisfaction and high stress, among other factors.
”This report’s findings correlate very closely with those of the earlier council study on supply and demand,” said Dave Balt, president of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa. The enormous administrative burden on teachers clearly impacts negatively on teaching time and teacher morale, he said; and this, in turn, is why the country is facing a shortage of between 30 000 and 35 000 teachers by 2008 — another of the council findings earlier this year.
”We can’t sell our own profession,” said Balt, ”to attract enough people to it, and findings such as those of the council studies this year, including this week’s, show why.”
In addition to the pressures of the new curriculum, about three-quarters of teachers also cited the Integrated Quality Management System — a new method of assessing teachers for purposes of salary increases and promotions — as further contributing to their workload. Other factors included class sizes, overcrowding and staff shortages.
At the same time, the report found that teachers spend less time overall on work than official policy specifies. Policy expects 43 hours per week — that is, 8,6 hours per day in a five-day week — to be spent on all activities. But the report found that teachers spent 41 hours per week — or 8,2 hours per day — on school-related activities.
Non-teaching time is taken up by planning and preparation (14%), assessment, evaluation, reports and record-keeping (14%), extra-curricular activities (12%), management and supervision (7%) and professional development (5%).
Overall, ”management and supervision, assessment and evaluation and extra-curricular activities are among the most significant activities that crowd out teaching”, the report says. And teachers ”spend progressively less time on teaching and other school-related activities as the week progresses, with very little teaching occurring on Fridays in many schools”.
The report says the national averages mask significant differences, for instance, between urban, semi-rural and rural areas. Generally, teachers in urban areas spend more time on teaching and administration than their counterparts in rural areas.
History also influences use of time, with teachers in formerly white schools spending more time over the week teaching (19,11 hours) and on other activities than teachers in former African schools (15,18 hours) and in new schools established since 1994.
”If the reasons for these findings are impositions on teachers by the Department of Education, then we’ll look at ways of reducing them,” said Duncan Hindle, Director General of education. ”But it’s a question whether some teachers are actually working all the hours policy requires.”
”This report is a real wake-up call,” said Jon Lewis of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union. He said the report vindicates the union’s repeated observation that teachers are having to spend too much time on clerical matters. There is a need for more administrative support, ”but in poor schools there are not even cleaners”. Teachers are not being used optimally, he said.