Page 7 - PDPOINTER092021

PD Pointer Volume 63 Page 7

A teacher retirement By Martin Gustafsson
Education economist, Stellenbosch
University

wave is about to hit SA He works for Stellenbosch Univer-
sity and the South African Govern-
ment. He has moreover done work
for the UNESCO Institute for Sta-
tistics. He receives funding from the National Re-
search Foundation, through his work with Research on
Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP), based at the Univer-
It could have a major impact on class size sity of Stellenbosch.

Tsekere Maponya, Deputy Director at the Department
T This article is republished from The Conversa- Planning, Provisioning and Monitoring unit, also con-
of Basic Education’s Education Human Resource
eacher supply and demand is a complex mat-
ter. The ultimate aim is to have a teacher in
tion under a Creative Commons license.
tributed to this article.
front of every class, now and for the foreseea-
ble future. This also implies an ideal class
size. The quality of teachers is obviously important too
– and a topic for another occasion.
In South Africa, the ideal class size is tacit, and not ods for teachers, and too few classes being taught at South Africa’s teachers enjoy the standard of living of
explicit, as there are no class size norms. Instead, it is any time. This is especially the case beyond Grade 3, teachers in a country like Denmark.
the available budget and negotiated teacher pay where it becomes increasingly common for teachers We conclude that evidence of sky-high pay among
which drive the number of teachers, which in turn to specialise in a curriculum subject. South Africa’s teachers is flawed. It is not just a prob-
largely determines the average class size. But there Fourthly, schools permitted to charge fees, which tend lem with South Africa’s figures: Nigeria’s teachers are
are other factors at play too, as we’ll explain. to be middle class schools, can employ additional said to be better paid that those in several European
If South Africa were to lower the pupil-teacher ratio teachers and thus reduce class sizes. Union countries.
from the current 30 to a typical middle income country The province a school is in plays a remarkably large We argue that existing international comparisons of
level of around 25, it would need an additional role. Schools with similar learner-educator ratios end teacher pay suffer from two serious problems. First,
100,000 teachers. Government spending on school- up with very different class sizes, depending on prov- how pay is defined, for instance with regard to bene-
ing is already fairly high, so it would be difficult to pay ince. fits and income tax, is frequently unclear, which raises
that many more teachers. The following graph shows that in primary schools comparability questions. Perhaps more seriously, pur-
Is the problem that teachers in South Africa are paid with an educator for every 32 learners, as an exam- chasing power parity indices are less reliable than
too much? We conducted an international comparison, ple, the percentage of the school’s learners in a class what is often believed. We deal with these problems
using household assets to stand in for purchasing exceeding 40 learners differs vastly. In Free State and by using household assets to provide what we believe
power. We found that South African teachers’ pur- Gauteng, this figure is around 30% of learners. In oth- is a more comparable indicator of purchasing power.
chasing power was not that different from that of Our conclusion that the pay of South Africa’s teachers
teachers in other middle income countries. is in fact not abnormally high substantially weakens
There is a window of opportunity which has received the argument that reducing class sizes by paying
insufficient attention. Soon there will be a large wave teachers less, and employing more of them, is a via-
of retirements among South African teachers, peaking ble or justifiable option.
around 2030 and ending in 2040. New, younger – and
lower paid – teachers will have to take their place. But Teacher retirement wave
this opportunity comes with questions around the ca-
pacity of universities to rapidly increase the output of It is very clear from the current age structure of the
teacher graduates. teacher workforce that there will be a large wave of
retirements until 2040. The expected surge in the in-
Factors influencing class size flow of younger teachers, who begin their careers at
entry level salaries, will be large enough to reduce
Around half of South Africa’s primary learners are in average teacher pay in real terms by as much as
classes with more than 40 learners. About 15% are in 15%, according to one estimate, over a period of just
classes exceeding 50 learners. The averages and ine- over ten years.
quality are considerably worse than what one sees in The demographic dividend will not be large enough to
countries such as Chile, Indonesia, Morocco and Iran. increase the teacher workforce by the 100,000 men-
tioned above, yet with careful planning, and careful
What explains the inequality? negotiation between the employer and unions, one
er provinces, it more than double that. outcome could be a reduction in South Africa’s large
There are four key factors. The learner-educator ratios used in this graph include classes.
Firstly, though policy distributes teaching posts equita- privately paid educators in public schools, so the The flipside of this dividend is that universities will
bly, not all posts are filled all the time. Historically dis- presence of such educators does not explain the con- need to approximately double their annual teacher
advantaged schools have the greatest difficulty filling trast. It seems much of the explanation would lie in graduate numbers between now and 2030.
posts. different approaches to using teacher time. But this is New research, involving the Department of Basic Edu-
Secondly, the policy doesn’t take classrooms into ac- an under-researched area. cation and other stakeholders, on the precise effects
count. Based on enrolment, 20 teaching posts could of the demographic shifts is set to be released later
be allocated to a school with 15 classrooms. Teacher pay this year.
Thirdly, there’s evidence that poor timetabling and This will provide another piece in the puzzle of teacher
poor use of teaching time result in too many free peri- A number of influential reports have argued that supply and demand.