As new figures reveal thousands of teachers are leaving the profession each year, Kaya Breakfast listeners weighed in on how it’s reshaping their children’s education.
Katlego Sekhu
South Africa isn’t short of teachers. It’s short of teachers who stay.
That was the sobering thread running through Kaya Breakfast’s discussion recently, sparked by a Daily Maverick front-page report that found 6,000 teachers walk out of South African classrooms every year and don’t come back.
Over five years, that adds up to 32,000 teachers gone. Meanwhile, 12,700 qualified teachers are sitting at home, unemployed, on the department’s own database, while more than half the country’s primary school children are packed into classrooms of 40 or more.
“It’s not that we don’t have teachers,” DJ Fresh noted on air. “We’re just losing the ones we’ve got faster than we’re putting teachers back into the system.” A Stellenbosch study cited during the segment found that nearly half of the teachers still in classrooms today are considering leaving within the next ten years.
For parents listening in, the numbers weren’t abstract. They were personal.
Mpho Maboi shared how they pulled their son out of his previous school after he went through four mathematics teachers in a single year. “Each teacher comes with a different teaching methodology,” she explained, and his marks suffered for it.
Thato described relocating and choosing a new school, only to watch teacher after teacher leave within months. “Three months in, teachers gone. You think, okay, maybe that’s normal. Five months in, two teachers have left. By the seventh month, they had lost about four or five.” The experience changed how they now vet schools altogether:
Questions posed to the Kaya audience were, what’s your rate of losing teachers? Your staff retention. Nobody ever asks that.
To hear the full discussion, listen to the podcast.
