SA not keeping up with exodus of experienced teachers, warn experts

South Africa’s education system is facing a crisis due to the retirement over the next 10 years of its most experienced teachers – and this will make the country’s current dire skill shortages even worse.

And it will be almost impossible to fill that knowledge and skills gap because current teaching programmes, especially distance learning, were compromising the quality of teachers coming into the system.

Chief executive officer at the Institute of Risk Management SA (IRMSA) Pat Semenya said SA was simply not keeping up because when the exodus occurs, it will help create another significant hurdle to the overall economic growth and recovery.

Section 3.5 of IRMSA’s 2022 Risk Report paints a picture of the dire situation, which notes that, “due to national policy and curriculum misalignments, limited focus on skills that are and will be in demand and poor adoption of digitalisation, SA does not have the skills it needs at the time that it needs them”.

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The report explains how there is not enough focus on these deeply ingrained structural issues in the skills economy and the failure to address these issues will result in economic collapse. Semenya also said while structural issues cannot be dealt with by thinking in the short term, the key to tackling the skills shortage lies in sustainable solutions.

“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 added.

‘Situation worse than just losing teachers’

According to experts, distance learning in colleges and universities was compromising the quality of teaching, while the departments also brought in unqualified and unskilled people as teachers’ assistants, while education students weren’t absorbed into the system for the experience.

South Africa is reportedly on the verge of losing more than 45% of its highly skilled government-employed teachers.

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

“Which isn’t a bad thing, but it means that they tend to keep high quality and high skill is being subverted, by a situation of allowing more low skilled people access into the schooling employment side.”

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However, department of basic education spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga insisted there was no crisis whatsoever, saying the department had planned for teacher recruitment and training using a whole range of measures.

“Ten years ago, the crisis was predicted to happen in 10 years’ time and where we stand now we have more teachers than we can employ,” he said. “The department has recruitment strategies that enable it to continue to attract teachers that should keep the system going.”

Mhlanga said the department was encouraging young people to choose teaching as a profession and using National Student Financial Aid Scheme for funding and Funza Lushaka bursary scheme recruitment, community recruitment – where youth from communities are funded to come back and teach where they live and also register qualified teachers who were not in teaching.

The National Association of School Governing Bodies said it was vital to start preparing young people in line with industry trends, “because you can’t just train teachers that are going to teach skills that will be not needed”.

“The department must start scouting among the assistant teachers because they have shown the interest of working with children. So we need to send them to school for the qualification,” said the association’s secretary, Matakanye Matakanye.

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za