Teacher retrenchments: A reckless tactic by the finance minister

Stop this alarmist rhetoric about teacher retrenchments! It is rather unfortunate and plain reckless that the finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, has resorted to what can best be described as bullying tactics to coerce the South African community to accept his proposed 2% increase in VAT.

He deliberately singled out education as the sector likely to be most affected if this particular revenue collection policy was not implemented. This is the mark of an immature politician and bureaucrat whose fixation with absolute numbers and budget balancing reveals his disconnect from the people he was elected to serve.

His careless utterances and thumb-suck estimates of 19 000 teacher retrenchments in KwaZulu-Natal alone clearly indicate that the minister’s intentions were meant to create anxiety and stress in the teaching fraternity and amongst parents. These particular tactics, namely, alarmists and extremist grenades that get thrown into the public arena by powerful politicians, are becoming more frequent and brazen.

It almost seems like the minister has taken a leaf out of a Donald Trump manual by deliberately causing consternation and uncertainty among the population. Yet, this finance ministry has shown remarkable ineptness in monitoring, regulating and auditing the use of public funds in many expenditure sectors, including education. The minister's ill-considered, thoughtless and inflammatory remarks indicate that the country's top leadership does not seem to be aware of the conditions in high-stakes sectors like school education.

It also suggests that there is very little communication between the ministries regarding how the implications of decisions made by the finance ministry affect the operations and functioning of other ministries. What is clear is that the threat of wide-scale teacher retrenchments is likely to have significant ripple effects.

In a schooling sector already plagued by underperformance, threats of teacher retrenchments do not engender confidence in the ability of the system to demonstrate improvements.

Of significance is that in a context of general teacher dissatisfaction with, amongst other issues, an overloaded curriculum, an excessive assessment regime where learners are subject to a battery of assessments across all the subjects they learn, salary structures that are not benchmarked against other professionals with a four-year qualification, under-resourced schools and an increasingly unruly and poorly disciplined learner population, the incentive for teachers to remain committed and deliver quality teaching is likely to be severely compromised when they are threatened with retrenchment.

This kind of unnecessary teacher trauma does not augur well for achieving the objective of attracting talented young people into the profession or for retaining teachers who are contemplating leaving the teaching profession.

Research indicates that an increasing number of qualified and experienced South African teachers are leaving the South African schooling sector to work overseas in better-paid teaching posts. This, together with natural teacher attrition due to retirement every year, will negatively affect the quality of education that South African children, especially in quintile 1-3 schools, are likely to receive.

Cutting education spending and retrenching teachers is a shortsighted, money-saving measure that will have long-term consequences. There is, however, an accurate public view that the education sector has not effectively and efficiently applied the funding that it receives every year. In the post-apartheid era, education has consistently received the highest percentage of the national budget every year, ahead of other just as vital sectors like health and social development.

Given that education is viewed as a means to social and economic upliftment, there is still a commitment to strengthening education at all levels. The pace and intensity, though, must be significantly improved. There is much public dissatisfaction with the return on investment from the education sector. In other words, the annual spending on school education, especially, does not deliver the educational outcomes that countries on the continent with lower budgets are delivering.

While there are several pieces to the puzzle that explain this continuing poly-crisis in school education, the availability of a sufficiently competent teacher cohort who enjoy job security and job satisfaction is arguably the most critical piece. More than a century of research studies on schooling systems worldwide reveals that teacher quality is the most vital factor determining a schooling system's success. Yet, this crucial element, namely the proficient, secure school teacher, is likely to move even further away as an achievable goal in South Africa.

There is a danger in describing South Africa’s schooling system as a homogenous terrain where equality in school provisioning exists. If anything, the schooling sector is becoming increasingly unequal every year as the market model for school education matures. A significant misstep that fuels the crisis in South African schooling is the decision by the state, through the South African Schools Act, to make the charging of school fees legal for quintile 4 and 5 schools and the decision to declare quintile 1-3 schools, no fee schools.

The effect was to immediately create a market for schooling in which the basic economic laws of demand and supply began to operate. Just like the market for cars, with luxury vehicles commanding high process because of enhanced safety features amongst other bells and whistles, affluent public schools that have clients that can afford to pay higher fees (some parents even borrow) can provide a much more enhanced schooling experience to these fortunate learners.

These schools can afford to recruit better teachers, pay them better and offer smaller class sizes, and a range of cultural and sporting activities. Such schools will survive teacher retrenchments if they do come into effect. Poor schools, on the other hand, in especially poorer non-white townships and rural areas, already suffer from under-resourcing and teacher shortages. In essence, the threat to retrench teachers is shameful and should not be used as a bargaining tool to force the finance ministry’s unrealistic tax policy proposals.

Professor Suriamurthee Maistry is a Decolonial and Critical Curriculum Scholar in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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