Umm Muhammed Umar

Professor Martin Gustafsson, an economist at Stellenbosch University, has predicted that a teacher retirement wave is about to hit South Africa, and that could impact on class sizes. Professor Gustafson said that the distribution of teachers by age shows a very large wave of teachers peaking around age 53 now.

Speaking to Radio Islam, Gustafsson said, “retirements have already started to go up because the beginnings of that wave has hit us and the wave is so large that it’s going to cause quite serious teacher supply problems.” He added, “universities are going to struggle to keep up with supply of new and young graduates that are needed to replace these people who retire.”

The situation has come about, according to Gustafsson, as a result of many years of planning, whether good or bad. He said that in South Africa, in the ’90’s, there was an oversupply of teachers, as too many people were being trained as teachers. Then, teacher training colleges were shut down. Professor Gustafsson said, “there was, this idea that we need to restrict the number of teachers that we trained, and now in a way the pendulum has swung and we’ve reached a point where we realize that we going to run up against problems where we aren’t able to provide enough young teachers.” Up until now, universities have responded well to the need for teachers. However, the need is expected to rise steeply in the next 10 years. According to Gustafsson, it’s clear that universities will struggle to meet that demand. He projected that around the year 2030, the number of teachers in training would have to go down again, or too many teachers would be produced. He explained that this was because most teachers who come into the system, remain in the system for their entire working life. He says that once all the teaching positions have been filled, teachers cannot simply be pushed into the system just because more teachers have been trained.

There is a link between this teacher retirement and the size of a class. A lot of younger teachers in the system means that teachers are going to actually cost less than they would otherwise because younger teachers come in at lower salary levels. That means that it should be affordable to employ new teachers. This does not necessarily mean it’s going to be affordable to increase the size of the workforce. Gustafsson said, “there may be money to extend the workforce so that it becomes even larger, and that could help to reduce class sizes.” A number of factors lie behind our very large class sizes in South Africa, one being the number of teachers. There are many other factors, for example, if you look across provinces, class sizes are quite different, even when you look at schools with the same endowments of teachers. This partially indicates that teaching time is used differently across different provinces. Gustafsson said, “If timetabling is not effective in a school, that can result in subject teaching being arranged in such a way that a lot of teachers who have some free periods, and then classes are larger than they should be.”

Regarding income, there is a sense that teachers in South Africa are overpaid. However, according to analysis undertaken by Gustafsson and a colleague, on assets in households, looking at the wealth of teachers, South African teachers earn similarly to other teachers in other middle-income countries, and not on a level of teachers in wealthy countries.