A NATIONAL survey recently indicated that approximately 50% of educators who are currently employed at schools in South Africa would prefer to retire early, and the primary motivation for this was heavy workloads and exhaustion.
The Teacher Preferences and Job Satisfaction Report has revealed that the majority of teachers have to cope with a lot of stress because of administrative tasks that are time-consuming and not always beneficial to the teaching and learning approach or system in place.
This was the overall stance of most educators who participated in the study.
The alarming revelation was that educators at all schools in South Africa highlighted stress levels due to demanding and inundated workloads.
It has always been assumed that teachers located in under-resourced schools or poorly resourced schools have higher stress levels than those employed at private or semi-private schools.
However, this is not the reality.
Educators employed at schools that facilitate middle to upper-class communities have revealed that the demands from parents are numerous, time-consuming, and unnecessary.
Some of these demands include parents viewing weekly tests with the teachers, even though teachers would have communicated test results and remedial work for the child to pursue.
Sometimes, these ‘concerned’ parents aim to ensure that their child has not been victimised unnecessarily by attaining fewer marks than what they could have achieved.
School Management in these instances needs to be blamed, as there are no regulations and teacher-parent frameworks that stipulate where parents can intervene in the teaching and learning process of the child.
Educators have indicated that there are substantial demands of being employed in the semi-private or private educational sector, and often, the wealthy have an attitude that implies teachers need to be accessible to parents continually.
The school management and parent bodies also pressurise teachers to always elicit good marks from learners. Most teachers revealed that learners are not responsible for their high stress levels, but other stakeholders attached to schools.
High school teachers and, in particular, Grade 11 and Grade 12 teachers are very stressed, as schools and individual learners depend on them to produce good pass rates at the end of their schooling careers.
In many of these former Model C schools or semi-private schools, teachers are not allowed to recruit administrative support, so that their workload become manageable.
Learners do have a tendency to blame teachers when they perform poorly academically, and school management will then question the teacher’s remedial lesson and revision lesson approach.
These circumstances have led to schools now encouraging teachers to offer ‘extra support lessons’ after a full day of teaching, even though they are not able to deliver the same intensity after 2 pm.
Teachers are then expected to give parents detailed feedback post the remedial lesson.
The ideal would be that the same teacher should not be teaching the child during school hours and after school hours as the related workload can be overwhelming.
There are a variety of options available for parents to consider when scouting for remedial tutoring or subject support.
Parents fail to realise that sometimes, a new or different learning approach to the same subject can positively impact the child’s learning capacity.
A break away from his or her regular schooling environment also allows a child to have a fresh approach to a subject.
Schools need to assess how effective their systems of additional learning support are for the learner and determine if it is beneficial for the child and teacher.
Long hours, and mental and physical exhaustion can ultimately impact the quality of teaching and impact on the value of the extra lesson are factors that need to be considered regarding additional lessons.
Most schools have not been allocated funds for additional support staff, and teachers have had to continue with the administrative tasks themselves.
In recent media reports, some rural schools in KwaZulu-Natal have been temporarily funded by their school's principals’ salaries as the Department of Education is yet to disburse their budget for running expenses for the academic year of 2025.
We are now in the fourth month of the year. This is seriously shocking for a country that is ‘supposedly committed to educational development as a central focus of societal growth’.
The study also revealed that the Western Cape and Gauteng were nominated as the preferred areas to be employed in, and that teachers are not willing to be employed in rural areas. In this instance, the government should incentivise posts as it is in those areas of South Africa that education and experienced educators are very much needed.
The higher the number of employed educators in the rural areas, the lower the ratio of children to teachers, which can positively impact the quality of teaching and learning in these areas.
The fact that almost 50% of South Africa’s educators are indicating their preference to leave their professions indicates that our system is negligent of our teachers’ needs.
For decades, teachers and unions have lodged complaints about the low pay that teachers receive, yet their tasks are based on developing the core of a society.
Educators teach life skills which include social and communication skills, a sense of self-identity, and building amidst peers in the classroom, understanding and pursuing logical thought, and the value of relevancy as well as the need to critically think, assess, and evaluate any scenario in life. The development of these skills takes place from an early age, and the teacher spends approximately six hours a day with the child.
South Africa needs to re-evaluate and include numerous ways to incentivise teachers to maintain their place of employment and encourage new and experienced educators who enter this sector to pursue professional development throughout their careers.
Schools should also consider ways in which they can offer teachers additional administrative support, so that teachers remain focused and energised to purely teach, which is their primary skill of high value.
South Africa is at risk of having fewer skilled and experienced educators and we need to ensure that over the next decade that these teachers opt to peruse employment and not leave teaching because of structural shortcomings, challenges and the lack of adequate pay.
DAILY NEWS