Teachers may be retired early to beat ‘age bulge’

But unions oppose plan to solve problem of too few educators under the age of 30

A SEVERE shortage of teachers under the age of 30 has prompted the Department of Basic Education to consider a proposal that could lead to early retirement packages being offered to educators.

But the idea, which the department’s director-general, Bobby Soobrayan, discussed in parliament recently, is set to be strongly opposed by unions.

This could place Soobrayan on a collision course with unions again, after they called for his head following last year’s textbook shortages.

On June 4, Soobrayan told parliament that “a key policy of the department was to bring younger teachers into the system”.

Just less than 45% of South Africa’s almost 390 000 state teachers in 2010 were aged between 40 and 49. Only 5.1% were aged between 20 and 29.

A total of 14 988 teachers left the profession between April 2011 and March last year for a variety of reasons, including retirement and death, whereas only 8 227 newly trained teachers aged 30 and younger were employed.

Soobrayan told parliament the problem was the “age bulge” among teachers aged 40 to 49. “If we sit back, in about five to 10 years that bulge is going to hit you hard; it will hit you for about 10 years very hard.

“The idea is to ask teachers, especially those who are not in shortage subjects, to consider early retirement.

“We give them early retirement at an early age so that we begin to create vacancies across the age gradient and then we start putting people into those vacancies so that we can have a better spread.

“Our strategy will need compliance by provinces, by unions. We need to make sure if we make this mechanism [early retirement] available that provinces don’t let the wrong teachers go. It happened before,” said Soobrayan.

A large number of qualified and seasoned teachers took severance packages after being offered the option in 1996, leaving hundreds of schools in the lurch. Soobrayan said: “If we say you can allow teachers to go early and then you let the maths teachers go, we’re in trouble.”

June 2011 figures revealed that 5 455 foreign teachers, mostly

Can we afford to create the opportunity for a whole lot of people to exit?

Zimbabweans, were teaching maths, science and technology in schools because of the shortage of local educators in these subjects.

At least 84 schools did not offer maths to grades 10 to 12 pupils last year because they did not have suitably qualified teachers, among other things.

Although Soobrayan made these comments in parliament, he downplayed the issue when contacted this week.

“I made it clear [in parliament] that we were simply illustrating options. The department is not discussing it [early retirement] as a policy option. What we are saying is the age bulge is a problem. The big thing is we are aggressively recruiting younger teachers and that will try to solve it.” He insisted that there was “nothing on the table at the moment about early retirement”.

The Western Cape education department’s superintendentgeneral, Penny Vinjevold, confirmed that her province was in talks with the national department on early retirement, but the Northern Cape said it had not been approached about the matter.

Opposition can be expected from the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) and the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa).

Sadtu’s general secretary, Mugwena Maluleke, said it would not embrace a system “that is going to impoverish our teaching profession. We will lose a lot of qualified teachers; it’s a wrong remedy. We need long-term solutions.”

He said research indicated that young teachers did not want to remain in the profession and stayed for only about five years.

Naptosa president Basil Manuel said: “Can we afford to create the opportunity for a whole lot of people to exit? Before we willy-nilly make such offers, we must be able to ascertain whether we would have people to replace these people.”

He said Naptosa would “cautiously” look at the proposal because there had been a battle to recruit suitable candidates into teaching.