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Financial Mail reports that for months education researchers have been flagging the fact that a huge wave of teacher retirements is going to hit SA between now and 2030, as more than half of public school teachers are already over the age of 50.
But, the good news is that, given the strides universities have made in ramping up the production of young teachers in recent years, they should be better able to meet the additional demand. New teacher graduates also score significantly higher than older teachers on content knowledge tests. This has fuelled hope that replacing older teachers with younger ones en masse could lead to better results. The bad news is that the government doesn’t appear to have the funds, or the inclination, to hire those new graduates. And, if provincial education departments choose not to employ them due to budget pressures, teacher numbers will essentially fall, allowing class sizes to rise. These are among the key, preliminary findings presented to the government recently by Stellenbosch University associate professor Nic Spaull and a team of researchers. It’s their first report-back on a three-year research project (2022-2024), “The Teacher Demographic Dividend”. One of the most striking early findings is that young graduate teachers in SA perform significantly higher than older teachers in maths, and quite a bit higher in reading. “It is clear that older teachers who were educated and trained under apartheid have lower levels of content knowledge than their younger colleagues who were trained at universities post-apartheid. This trend is especially evident in mathematics,” the researchers found.
- Read the full original of the detailed report in the above regard by Claire Bisseker at Financial Mail (subscriber access only)
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page