For months education researchers have been fiercely flagging the fact that a huge wave of teacher retirements is going to hit South Africa between now and 2030, as more than half of public school teachers are already over the age of 50.
The good news is that, given the strides universities have made in ramping up the production of young teachers in recent years, they should be better able to meet the additional demand. New teacher graduates also score significantly higher than older teachers on content knowledge tests, especially in maths.
This has fuelled hope that replacing older teachers with younger ones en masse could lead to better results.
The bad news is that the government doesn’t appear to have the funds, or the inclination, to hire those new graduates. And, if provincial education departments choose not to employ them due to budget pressures, teacher numbers will essentially fall, allowing class sizes to rise.
These are among the key, preliminary findings presented to the government recently by Stellenbosch University associate professor Nic Spaull and a team of researchers. It’s their first report-back on a three-year research project (2022-2024), “The Teacher Demographic Dividend ”.
One of the most striking early findings is that young graduate teachers in South Africa perform significantly higher than older teachers in maths, and quite a bit higher in reading, according to research by Spaull and Stellenbosch University economics doctoral student Peter Courtney.
“It is clear that older teachers who were educated and trained under apartheid have lower levels of content knowledge than their younger colleagues who were trained at universities post-apartheid,” they write. “This trend is especially evident in mathematics.”
This is based on data from the Southern & Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality teacher tests, which tested a nationally representative sample of grade 6 teachers on their reading and maths content knowledge. It was conducted in 2007 and again in 2013.
The 2007 data showed that the average grade 6 maths teacher in South Africa couldn’t score 60% on questions at the grade 6 or 7 level.
Spaull and Courtney completed a similar analysis using the 2013 data and found content knowledge levels were worryingly low across the board, especially for older teachers. Only 37% of grade 6 reading teachers and 41% of grade 6 maths teachers in South Africa had “mastery” levels of knowledge in these subjects (a score of 60% or higher on the test).
This was considerably lower than teachers’ maths proficiency in the same test in Kenya (95%), Zimbabwe (87%) and Uganda (77%).
But the 2013 report also showed that younger teachers score between 70 and 90 points higher than older teachers in maths and between 44 and 46 points higher in reading
Still, even when teacher content knowledge is the same across countries, South African grade 6 pupils achieve lower reading and maths scores than their peers in most other African countries.
This indicates that there may be other factors involved, “such as low levels of teacher accountability”, suggest the researchers. In other words, even within existing knowledge constraints, the current crop of teachers could be doing more to improve pupils’ performance.
A simultaneous teacher retirement and pupil enrolment bulge, peaking in 2030, is an opportunity to revitalise the system
— What it means:
One explanation for this poor state of affairs could be that while prospective teachers have similar overall matric results to other degree candidates, they are less likely to take maths (as opposed to maths literacy), and their maths results are far weaker.
According to Wits University doctoral researcher Irene Pampallis, South African matriculants who enrolled in BEd degrees from 2008 to 2015 achieved an adjusted average of 41% for matric maths, compared with 54% for students enrolled in other degrees.
“It is particularly alarming to note that at Unisa, which trains far more teachers than any other university, only 10% of incoming BEd students in the years 2014-2016 had taken mathematics in matric and passed with at least 50%,” says Pampallis.
BEd entry requirements are on the lower end of the spectrum and it is one of the few degrees that doesn’t require a minimum mark for maths or maths literacy at many universities.
“This may funnel students who are weaker academically into teaching programmes because they do not meet the entry requirements for more selective programmes,” Pampallis says.
It also means it will be difficult to improve the academic calibre of prospective teachers without improving matric outcomes more generally, or drawing candidates into teaching who would not otherwise have chosen it as a career.
Interestingly, the teaching profession seems to be gaining popularity among students, with the growth in BEd enrolments noticeably higher than for other undergraduate degrees in recent years.
As a consequence, the number of teacher education graduates tripled from about 9,000 in 2010 to more than 28,000 in 2019.
“This suggests that universities opened more spaces or otherwise encouraged students to study teaching, or alternatively that the teaching profession gained popularity among students for other reasons,” say Pampallis and Stellenbosch University researcher Bianca Böhmer in a separate study.
The success universities have achieved in increasing the production of graduate teachers makes the looming retirement wave “less worrying”, say Stellenbosch University researchers Servaas van der Berg and Martin Gustafsson in another study.
They say universities should be able to deal with a demand for a larger teacher workforce to reduce the number of pupils per teacher (the learner-educator, or LE, ratio), and put the country back on an improved trajectory in international testing programmes.
It is clear that older teachers who were educated under apartheid have lower levels of content knowledge than their younger colleagues who were trained at universities post-apartheid … especially in maths
— Nic Spaull and Peter Courtney
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned.
“What emerges as the greatest constraint,” they say, “is a lacking commitment to increasing the teacher workforce in line with a substantial increase in the child population, an increase which was not anticipated even 10 years ago.”
They expect the surge in school enrolments to peak in about 2030 — at exactly the same time as teacher retirements will peak at almost 17,300 people.
This means it will not be enough to just replace those teachers exiting the system, which alone will require about 6,000-13,000 more teaching graduates to be produced each year by 2030 than now.
Given that the pupil population is also set to grow by 6.2% over the same period (assuming the current trend of a declining number of pupils who drop out before they reach matric continues) and if the government wants to prevent class sizes from rising, the teacher headcount will also have to increase by 6.2% over and above that required to replace those exiting the system.
Gustafsson models three scenarios that depend on the government’s policy choices regarding teacher headcounts, LE ratios and class sizes.
In scenario 1, the total teacher headcount remains constant, with new teachers just replacing those who exit the system. The total number of teachers required would have to increase from about 25,000 now to 32,000 by 2030 — an increase of 28%.
In scenario 2, the LE ratio is kept at its 2021 level of 30:1 in spite of school population growth and greater pupil retention to matric. Roughly 36,000 more teachers would be needed by 2030 — an increase of 44%.
In scenario 3, in addition to the replacing of teachers who exit the system, compensation for school population growth and improvement of pupil retention, the government also elects to reduce the LE ratio to its 2012 level of 27:1 by 2030. That would require about 42,000 additional teachers by 2030 — an increase of 68%.
The problem, of course, is finding the public finances to meet this demand.
“There is a real trade-off between what teachers earn and how many can be employed,” says Spaull. He points out that the average teacher’s total package per month (including benefits) was R42,668 in 2019, putting teachers in the top 5% of South Africa’s income distribution.
In a separate study, Stellenbosch University PhD student Poppie Ntaka finds that while universities have increased the production of teachers to meet the government’s targets, provincial education departments have not been hiring the requisite numbers, “likely due to cost constraints”.
In 2021, roughly 28,335 teachers graduated, but only about half (14,524) were hired by the provinces.
The nub of the problem, she finds, is that teacher salaries were allowed to grow 15% faster than inflation between 2013 and 2019, placing serious pressure on provincial education budgets, which didn’t grow as quickly.
This means that real spending per pupil has declined significantly, and many provinces have frozen senior educator posts to save funds. In fact, between 2019 and 2021 South Africa’s public school sector shed 2,071 head of department and 763 deputy principal positions.
“Though freezing [such] posts may seem an expedient measure to reduce spending, people holding these posts are meant to play important roles in monitoring curriculum coverage, offering support to teachers, managing assessment and dealing with the professional development of teachers,” say Spaull and Ntaka.
They warn that no-fee and rural schools will be most affected by the growing gap between teacher retirements and stagnant hiring practices. If provinces fail to replace teachers who exit the system, those who remain will be faced with large and growing class sizes, especially in poor, remote schools.
But there is also the prospect that the quality of teaching will improve with the hiring of better-educated, younger teachers. It all depends on the way the transition is managed.
The research project means government will have no excuse for not making timeous evidence-based decisions.
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