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The supply of and demand for teachers is a complex issue. The ultimate goal is to have a teacher in front of every class, now and for the foreseeable future. It also implies an ideal class size. The quality of teachers is obviously also important – and a topic for another occasion.
In South Africa, the ideal class size is implied and not explicit, as there are no standards on class size. Instead, it is the available budget and negotiated teacher remuneration that determines the number of teachers, which in turn largely determines the average class size. But there are also other factors at play, as we will explain.
If South Africa were to lower the current student-teacher ratio from 30 to a level typical of middle-income countries of around 25, it would need 100,000 more teachers. Public expenditure on schooling is already quite high, so it would be difficult to pay so many more teachers.
Is the problem that teachers in South Africa are overpaid? We conducted an international comparison, using household assets to substitute for purchasing power. We found that the purchasing power of South African teachers was not that different from that of teachers in other middle-income countries.
There is a window of opportunity that has not received enough attention. Soon there will be a big wave of retirements among South African teachers, peaking around 2030 and ending in 2040. New teachers, younger and less well paid, will have to take their places. But with this opportunity comes questions about the ability of universities to rapidly increase the production of graduate teachers.
Factors influencing class size
About half of primary learners in South Africa are in classes of over 40 learners. About 15% are in classes of more than 50 learners. Averages and inequalities are considerably worse than what we see in countries like Chile, Indonesia, Morocco and Iran.
What explains the inequality? There are four key factors.
First, although the policy distributes teaching posts equitably, not all posts are filled on a permanent basis. Historically disadvantaged schools have the greatest difficulty in filling positions.
Second, the policy ignores classrooms. On the basis of enrollment, 20 teaching posts could be allocated to a school with 15 classrooms.
Third, there is evidence that poor scheduling and misuse of teaching time results in too many free time for teachers and too few lessons being taught at any one time. This is particularly the case beyond Grade 3, when it becomes more and more common for teachers to specialize in a subject in the curriculum.
Fourth, schools authorized to charge fees, which are usually middle class schools, can employ additional teachers and thereby reduce class sizes.
The province in which a school is located plays a remarkably important role. Schools with similar learner-educator ratios end up with very different class sizes, depending on the province. The following graph shows that in primary schools with one educator per 32 learners, as an example, the percentage of school learners in a class exceeding 40 learners differs considerably. In Free State and Gauteng, this figure is around 30% of learners. In the other provinces, it is more than double. Learner-educator ratio in the South African provinces. Department of Basic Education.
The learner-educator ratios used in this graph include privately paid educators in public schools, so the presence of such educators does not explain the contrast. It seems that much of the explanation lies in the different approaches to using teachers’ time. But this is an under-researched area.
Teacher remuneration
A number of influential reports have argued that South African teachers enjoy the standard of living of teachers in a country like Denmark.
We conclude that the evidence for exorbitant salaries among South African teachers is flawed. It’s not just a problem with South Africa’s numbers: Nigerian teachers are said to be better paid than those in several European Union countries.
We argue that existing international comparisons of teacher pay suffer from two serious problems. First, the way in which remuneration is defined, for example with regard to benefits and income tax, is often unclear, which raises questions of comparability. More serious perhaps, the purchasing power parity indices are less reliable than is often believed. We address these issues by using household assets to provide what we believe to be a more comparable indicator of purchasing power.
Our finding that South African teachers’ salaries are in fact not unusually high weakens considerably the argument that reducing class sizes by paying teachers less and employing more of them is a viable or justifiable option. .
Teacher retirement wave
It is very clear from the current age structure of the teaching workforce that there will be a big wave of retirements until 2040. The average salary of teachers in real terms up to 15% , according to one estimate, over a period of just over ten years.
The demographic dividend will not be large enough to increase the teaching workforce by the 100,000 mentioned above, but with careful planning and careful negotiation between the employer and the unions, a result could be a reduction in the number of teachers. large classes in South Africa.
The flip side of this dividend is that universities will need to roughly double the annual number of graduate teachers by 2030.
New research, involving the Ministry of Basic Education and other stakeholders, on the precise effects of demographic changes is expected to be published later this year. This will provide another piece in the puzzle of teacher supply and demand.
Tsekere Maponya, Deputy Director of the Education Human Resources Planning, Procurement and Monitoring Unit of the Ministry of Basic Education, also contributed to this article.
Martin Gustafsson works for the University of Stellenbosch and the South African government. He also worked for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. It receives funding from the National Research Foundation, through its work with Research on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP), based at Stellenbosch University.
By Martin Gustafsson, Education Economist, University of Stellenbosch
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