The government’s introduction this year of full-cost bursaries for students studying to become teachers has had an immediate impact. The number of first-year university students in initial professional education of teachers (Ipet) programmes is double that of last year.
But, despite this increase, there has been no rise in the number of people training to become African-language foundation-phase teachers (that is, for grades one, two and three). The serious shortage here puts the government’s policy to promote mother-tongue instruction in the early years of schooling in dire straits.
In addition, until the current first-year students graduate — a minimum of four years from now — the country’s teacher training system will continue producing only about 30% of the number of new teachers needed annually to replace the roughly 20 000 lost to the profession through normal attrition such as retirement.
The latest figures on teacher supply were provided to the Mail & Guardian by Wally Morrow, former dean of education at the then University of Port Elizabeth. Using data supplied by all university deans of education, Morrow shows that last year’s first-year registration of 5 173 students in Ipet programmes has doubled to 10 806.
Yet, only 5% of all Ipet students — that is, in all years of study — are training to be African-language foundation-phase teachers. This is the same low percentage that Morrow’s equivalent data for last year revealed and suggests that the new bursaries are not getting to all the target groups the government intended.
The bursary scheme — called Fundza Lushaka (Teach the Nation) — prioritises applicants aiming to teach in the foundation phase, as well as those training to teach indigenous languages and other scarce skills subjects such as technology, maths and science.
Sue Muller, director of curriculum matters for the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa, speculated that part of the problem concerns whether potential student teachers from rural areas and in townships even know about the new bursaries.
‘It is poorer schools in such areas that usually don’t have career counsellors to advise school leavers on financial assistance for university study. Considering how often our union receives reports from schools that haven’t received official circulars concerning crucial things such as exams and curriculum changes, this could well be a large factor.â€
Yusef Waghid, dean of education at Stellenbosch University, said: ‘The biggest challenge is to attract black Africans into the professionâ€. He stressed that universities themselves have to be proactive in recruitment, saying that his faculty has created a task team to go into remote rural areas in the Northern Cape and into townships for this purpose.
Morrow ascribes the problem with recruiting teachers to the lower grades to the social perception that teaching in the senior grades carries more status. He also said the merging of former colleges of education into universities has had ‘a devastating effect on college staff. They were the experts at training students for the junior grades, yet, because they often couldn’t meet the higher qualifications needed for university posts, many were phased out.â€
The government’s stress on higher-level skills such as maths and science ‘overlooks the extent to which acquisition of these depends on skills such as reading and writing, which primary schools should be teaching but are not,†he said.