Teachers who retire and those who remain are both a concern
South Africa is facing a dire shortage of experienced teachers who are due to retire by 2030. Beyond that, the quality of those who will continue as well as those who enter the system is also troubling. By
South African education is facing a severe teacher shortage within the next decade. More than half the current workforce is over the age of 55 and due to retire by 2030.
By the time our reading panel hopes to have all our children reading, we will have only 45% of our teachers left to teach. As is sadly typical in our bimodal system, this problem is worse in areas of social and economic deprivation – the vast majority of teachers approaching retirement are based in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape.
We have far more English-speaking teachers than we need and far too few isiZulu-speaking teachers.
Teacher-to-pupil ratios in these schools and communities are staggeringly high for a country at our level of development. In 2015, roughly half of Grade 5 pupils in South Africa were in classes larger than 40.
By comparison, in Morocco, 21% of pupils were in classes of more than 40, while in Indonesia and Jordan this was true for only 15% of learners.
Although much of this has to do with inefficient teacher use and timetabling, the forthcoming wave of retirements is likely to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Too few recruits
The challenge worsens when we shift our focus from demand to supply. Teaching is not considered an attractive career in terms of salary or progression, and as a result there are simply not enough young matriculants signing up to study teaching. On average, only 10.5% sign up for BEd degrees. Only half of those who graduate go on to teach in public schools.
We know that this is yet another symptom of the legacy of apartheid. Underresourced and disadvantaged communities have not had enough time, money or support to make up for the years that the locusts took. Our state system is overwhelmed by the deficit and is straining to make up the backlog, which has been exaggerated in recent years by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The focus at the moment is squarely on policies to increase enrolment and raise the bar for teachers entering the profession. Improving standards to qualify for a BEd, improving teacher training and degrees, increasing the number of applicants enrolling and more controversial measures such as postponing the retirement age and introducing non-qualified graduates as teachers are all policy options under discussion.
Maths conundrum
But here’s the real humdinger. Of all of the students signing up to take BEd degrees, only one in five achieved more than 50% for maths when they wrote matric. This is far worse than their contemporaries who took up other degrees – more than half of those matriculants achieved 50% or more for maths.
A study in 2008 found that maths specialist teachers averaged 66% in a Grade 6 primary maths test. The same study showed that the average score for a teacher taking a Grade 6 language test was 55%.
We know from the oft-quoted Progress in International Reading Literacy Study data that 78% of South African pupils cannot read for meaning.
We don’t just have a teacher shortage crisis. We have a teacher quality crisis.
Improving university standards (entry and degree completion), pre-service teacher training and initial teacher training are all helpful policy discussions when considering the pipeline of emerging teachers. But what is to be done to continue to support and develop those already in practice?
The experience of the Education Partnerships Group (EPG) in leadership and teacher development has taught us that supporting school leaders is the best place to start if we want to systematically strengthen the quality of teaching across the country. Evidence shows that there is a direct path between good leadership and student outcomes: 60% of student impact is because of combined principal and teacher effectiveness, with principals accounting for 25%.
Lack of training and skills
However, many principals lack the necessary training and skills to support high-quality teaching and learning processes in their schools. If we’re going to improve teaching, we need to support principals as effective leaders of instruction.
For the past five years, EPG’s Instructional
Leadership Institute has been training school leaders across the country, equipping principals with the skills and tools they need to develop their teachers and deliver better outcomes for their pupils, with a focus on underresourced communities.
The institute coaches principals on key levers of school improvement. Through in-person training and monthly coaching sessions at schools, principals learn how to build a staff and student culture. They learn how to observe lessons and give constructive developmental feedback, deliver excellent professional development sessions, and develop a data-driven culture of teaching and learning.
There has been a marked improvement in school culture and remarkable gains in outcomes, particularly in primary schools. Annual systemics indicate that Grade 3 and
Grade 6 maths and language outcomes have improved both in relative and absolute terms. There are other organisations providing similar support with similar success. Edufundi, Common Good, Acorn Education and Funda Wande all employ coaches to work directly with teachers and leaders to great effect, focusing on the core business of running a school: teaching and learning.
Providing principals with the tools to develop their teachers is a proven and scalable approach that can be deployed quickly to improve quality teaching.
Principals also need the wider levers of the education system to work in unison to support and reinforce their efforts to drive
excellence.
Shortage crisis
There is a shortage crisis, and we do need more teachers. We need to seize this unique opportunity with so many entering the system at once and provide them with quality pre-service training. But we cannot do so at the risk of ignoring those currently in the system. These teachers need proven methods of support such as feedback, coaching and data to help them continue to hone their craft.
In addition to this support, our teachers, principals and government officials need targets focused on pupil achievement, with real and measurable accountability that actively drives high standards and excellent outcomes.
We manage what we measure. As I noted in a previous column, there is a woefully poor focus in our country on whether our children are actually learning. In order to harness the support of circuit managers and school governing bodies effectively, we need to shift the focus in our system from measuring inputs (curriculum coverage, policy adoption, etc) to measuring outcomes.
Turning our attention to learner outcomes has the potential to redirect the system’s resources and efforts to indicators that matter, such as teacher quality. This will ultimately lead to stronger leadership, better teaching and improved outcomes.