BusinessLive reports that teacher unions have panned the plan by the SA Council of Educators (Sace) to require teachers to reregister every three years.  

They say it would be impractical and won’t help improve the standard of teaching.  Instead, they want the council to focus on updating its register and removing people who were unfit to teach, such as those found guilty of misconduct.  Sace told Parliament on Tuesday that it wanted to scrap the current system, which allowed a teacher to register for life.  It wanted a system in which teachers would have to apply to reregister every three years, linking it to a requirement that they earned at least 150 ‘‘continuing professional teacher development’’ points during this period.  The SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) opposes the plan, saying that teachers should maintain their registration for life and only lose it if found guilty of misconduct.  The National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of SA (Naptosa) said it was not convinced by the reasoning behind reregistration.  The Public Servants Association (PSA) said it had not been consulted on the proposal and first heard about it in the media.  Reregistering 450,000 teachers would be an administrative nightmare and would not make a substantive difference to the quality of teaching, said the PSA’s Leon Gilbert.

• Read this report by Tamar Kahn in full at BusinessLive

Read the PSA’s press statement at SA Labour News

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page