Teacher vacancies in South African public schools have risen to more than 31,000, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has revealed.
This is up from 28,000 in 2021. Motshekga provided the figure this week while responding to a parliamentary question by DA MP Boxolile Nodada.
31,000 teacher vacancies
According to the Minister, KwaZulu-Natal has the highest number of teacher vacancies, followed by Eastern Cape and Limpopo. Nationally, the exact figure is 31,462 as indicated in the table below.
Province | Number of vacancies |
---|---|
EAST CAPE | 6 111 |
FREE STATE | 1 117 |
GAUTENG | 3 898 |
KWAZULU-NATAL | 7 044 |
LIMPOPO | 4 933 |
MPUMALANGA | 1 931 |
NORTH CAPE | 726 |
NORTH WEST | 1 205 |
WESTERN CAPE | 4 497 |
NATIONAL | 31 462 |
There have been concerns that qualified teachers remain unemployed while the number of vacant posts keeps rising.
Motshekga said the filling of vacant posts is an “ongoing process to ensure that there is no class without a teacher for all grades.”
“For Post Level One vacancies, schools are allowed to recruit at local level and immediately as the vacancy occurs and make temporary appointments,” she explained.
“These appointments are then made permanent upon ensuring that the educator meets the requirements of the post. By law, a temporary appointment in a vacant substantive post must be made permanent after three months.”
Schools can also make acting appointments for promotional posts, such as Departmental Head and Principal, pending formal recruitment processes.
“In addition, in order to address immediate workload challenges that result from vacant promotional posts, schools are allowed to appoint temporary educators against a vacant promotional post until the vacant promotion post is filled,” the Minister added.
This means that while a post may be designated as vacant, there is often a temporary appointment in place.
“The fact that these are vacancies doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the posts,” Basil Manuel, the Executive Director of teachers union NAPTOSA, told eNCA on Thursday (18 April).
“What it means is that the number of temporary teachers [has] swollen in rank and that is disconcerting to us. But there are a number of posts that are not filled and that is of even greater concern.”