DURBAN - BASIC Education Minister Angie Motshekga said her department has a total of 24 556 vacant teacher posts, but this does not mean that there is a shortage of teachers at schools.
Motshekga, in a statement issued on Wednesday, said the teacher vacancies also did not imply that there were pupils who were left unattended at schools.
Motshekga said in her written reply to Parliament that there was a total of 24 556 vacant posts.
She said what it simply meant was that the process of finalising the appointment of the people currently in posts was ongoing.
Motshekga said there were more teachers on the department database than what the country’s schools could accommodate.
She said the database had thousands of teachers who were requested to apply for jobs, as and when they became available.
The minister said in addition to this, universities produced an estimated total of 25 000 teachers a year, who are not able to get employment in the system due to the lack of capacity to absorb all of them.
“This means that there are more teachers than the system can accommodate. The DBE worked with 24 universities, offering initial teacher education programmes during 2020/21 to compile information on all initial teacher education students. Last year 13 085 Funza Lushaka bursaries were awarded for initial teacher education.
“The vacancy rate reported is in terms of the actual vacancies at schools in relation to the posts that each school was allocated in 2021. Once this process has been finished and the residual vacant posts have been filled through appointment of educators from outside the system, the actual number of vacancies will be lower than the actual rate,” said Motshekga.
“Provincial Education Departments are currently deploying educators that are additional to the allocated post establishments at some schools to schools that have vacancies,” said Motshekga.
Daily News