The teacher is now a pupil for life
The new approach is to see teaching as an ever-changing path of development
There are more than 400 000 teachers, which makes teaching one of the large employment sectors in the country. But public service on this scale means a great deal can go wrong if it is not appropriately regulated.
The standard of teachers is one of the major concerns that has plagued the sector as the country strives for quality teaching and education.
In the past two decades, there have been several moves to improve this. Initially, to address the ills of apartheid, these were to upgrade and reskill teachers; more recently they have been aimed at the development of teachers throughout their careers.
The recent national teacher education framework (NTEF) distinguishes between two phases of teacher development.
The first is to develop “beginning” teacher competence, with the attainment of a bachelor of education (BEd) or a postgraduate certificate in education. These are the only recognised initial teacher education qualifications for employment in the South African school system.
The second phase of the framework focuses on being teachers, and on conveying a strong message that they are professionals — that once they have obtained their initial qualifications they have not ended their studies.
Changes in school education are a strong feature in any education system. Hence, teachers must make it their professional responsibility to keep up with such changes and to address any particular needs (personal, schooling and teaching profession) that arise throughout their careers. A regulatory process in the framework has now formalised the concept of continuous professional development to cater for the needs of teachers.
There have been several iterations of the BEd degree. Its predecessor, the BPaed degree, was based on an applied science model of teacher development. Students learnt about how to teach and, after qualifying, they would be expected to apply their knowledge when they became teachers.
Since the BPaed degree, there have been three national teacher development frameworks: the committee of teacher education policy, the norms and standards for educators and the NTEF, which have shifted the model towards that of teacher development, which integrates knowledge and practice. Each new framework was considered progressive and tried to address the needs of the South African school education system at particular stages of its development.
The teacher education policy was largely symbolic and attempted to unify the divergent teacher education programmes that were offered at 281 teacher education institutions under apartheid.
The norms and standards framework was influenced by the outcomes-based philosophy and began with identifying what roles teachers needed to perform.
The NTEF recognises that teachers have different training needs.
The BEd degree offered by the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), which is one of the largest producers of teachers in the country, and most other universities was conceived with this framework in mind and was guided by the policy on minimum requirements for teacher education qualifications that was gazetted last year.
The demand for participation in teacher education programmes has been phenomenal in the past decade. In 2015, for example, there were more than 25 000 applications for about 1 000 first-year places.
There are several reasons for this, including dedicated bursaries for teacher education students and job opportunities in the teaching sector, which is much higher than in any other sector. Theoretically, there are