As many university education faculties face financial meltdown, South Africa is training only about a third of new teachers needed to replace those leaving the school system each year, according to a government report.
The report observes that there are about 350 000 state-employed teachers in public schools and about 100 000 employed by school governing bodies or in independent schools. Teachers leave the system at a rate of between 5% and 5,5% per year, meaning that between 17 500 and 22 500 new teachers need to be produced annually. But the training system is producing, at best, a third of the required number, it says.
The report, by the ministerial committee on teacher education appointed by former education minister Kader Asmal in February 2003, says the training crisis is a key consequence of the lack of a national teacher education policy. It was handed to current Minister of Education Naledi Pandor last July.
Teacher unions and other educationists want to know what the Department of Education has been doing with the report. Now the department’s Director General, Duncan Hindle, has told the Mail & Guardian that it is “using [the report] in order to finalise the National Framework for Teacher Education” and that the completed framework “is likely to be published in the first quarter of this year”.
The report by the committee, chaired by Wally Morrow, former dean of education at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, says a major crisis in the supply of teachers is imminent, but “is being obscured by the (perceived) availability of a large pool of qualified teachers no longer employed as teachers”.
“But we do not have reliable data about the size of this ‘pool’, nor about what the Phase or Learning Area qualifications are of teachers in this pool, nor about how many in this pool are ready and available to take up teaching posts. What we can say with certainty is that it is a shrinking pool and it cannot be counted on as a substitute for the production of new teachers.”
Compounding this problem is the “financial meltdown” faced by many education faculties, which are now the only institutions training teachers. This is because the subsidy universities receive for initial teacher education programmes — the bachelor of education (BEd) and the postgraduate certificate in education — are “unreasonably pegged in a lower funding category than, for instance, management sciences, communication, computer science, languages, philosophy and social sciences”.
The subsidy level for initial teacher education “needs to be improved as a matter of great urgency”, because the capacity of universities to provide initial teacher education programmes “is deteriorating rapidly”.
In many education faculties, as many as half the staff are on temporary contracts, because the low subsidy level does not provide a sufficient incentive for universities “to give more weight to their responsibilities for teacher education”.
The report strongly recommends that the traditional system of full-cost loans tied to service contracts be restored for students undertaking initial teaching education programmes.
The cost to individuals of a four-year BEd is between R84 000 and R120 000, “and this is unaffordable for most students who aspire to become teachers. In a climate of serious unemployment, a service contract, linked to guaranteed employment (for the length of the contract) would be a major incentive” for prospective students.
Another recommendation to reduce costs for aspiring teachers is that the BEd be replaced by a three-year degree programme, “followed by a year of formal induction during which the novice teacher would be employed and paid a salary”.
The report also notes that there is currently no system of continuing professional teacher development, which aims to “enable teachers continually to revitalise and improve their professional practices”. The system is especially important in the context of far-reaching curriculum reform and because many serving teachers have not yet reached minimum qualification levels.
Morrow told the M&G the qualifications framework itself needs to be rethought, so that there is a clear distinction between professional and academic qualifications. “There’s now a muddle,” he said. “Many programmes contribute neither to better teacher practice nor to the academic study of education.”
Hindle said the final policy document would “indicate the position of the Department of Education in regard to all issues raised in the report of the ministerial committee”.