The future depends on good teachers

When the chief executive officer at the Institute of Risk Management SA (Irmsa) warns about what her analysts believe is a looming crisis for South Africa, we had better pay attention.

Pat Semenya says the institute 2022 Risk Report warns that the country is facing an educational crisis over the next 10 years because of the loss to retirement of our most experienced teachers. That would be an issue for concern, but not a crisis, were it not for parallel problems in the training of the educators needed to fill the shoes of these retiring teachers.

Semenya says current teaching programmes, especially distance learning, are compromising the quality of teachers coming into the system.

“As we are about to lose a large chunk of skilled, qualified teachers, government and private institutions should be investing in scholarships and programmes to produce young teachers to develop improved educational policy and fill the gap,” she says.

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Wayne Hugo, University of KwaZulu-Natal associate professor in education, says “the situation is worse than just losing teachers”, because “what it means is that you’ve got a direct line into employment in schools, from people who aren’t actually qualified”.

Unless serious attention is paid to producing top quality teachers, rather than just filling posts, our children are going to be severely short-changed. Already, the educational system has far too many teachers who are unprofessional and not committed.

Too many view teaching as “just a job”, when it should be a vocation. In conjunction with this, there needs to be a serious review of the salaries of teachers. These need to be raised across the board, but should also be linked to performance.

Investments in education pay dividends: successful countries have good school and university systems. Our future depends on this; we must not get it wrong.