There was a time when an educational qualification guaranteed one employment in SA but in recent years it is not a shock to meet an unemployed teacher graduate.
That is why we understood the mixed reactions to the proposal to recruit teachers from India and southern Africa to alleviate the shortage in specialising teachers.
As part of the critical skills the country needs, the home affairs department in February published its list that included science, technology, engineering and maths teachers for grades 8-12.
There was also a study done by Stellenbosch University, for the department of higher education, on teacher supply and demand which found that public schools would need 39,500 new teachers in 2025, and 52,000 more five years later, as reported by Sunday Times.
Researchers recommended that the department could hire teachers from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana and India.
The National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA said recruiting foreign teachers “cannot be a bad idea if we can’t supply our own from here”.
The Professional Educators’ Union said it supported the proposal as many schools were without maths and science teachers, but only as a temporary measure.
The SA Teachers' Union has turned down the suggestion and said “there are more than enough competent teachers in SA”, while the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union did not respond to Sunday Times' queries.
We are not opposed to foreign teachers being employed in SA to solve an immediate shortage but long-term plans to produce more maths and science teachers must be put in place. This can be done by engaging universities and colleges on what speciality of teachers is scarce.
We saw teachers marching in KwaZulu-Natal demanding that more than 2,000 frozen posts be filled. There were also threats of retrenchments due to budget cuts in that province. Retrenchments were later taken off the table but the department was still not hiring.
However, contracts of 465 foreign teachers in North West and Limpopo were not renewed in December. There were also reports of thousands of vacant posts in the Eastern Cape.
This means the department of basic education would need to prioritise filling general posts with available skills first, then it can look at hiring from outside for specialising teachers to fill current vacancies.
The study has revealed there would be more shortages in the near future. That gives the department a chance to come up with an urgent strategy to produce the teachers it needs.
Hiring from abroad can offer a quick fix, but our country needs a long-term solution for this problem, more so with our high unemployment rate.
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