UNIONS representing teachers are on the brink of reaching a deal with the government to reinstate the R500 million incentive for remote rural and hard-to-reach schools and those experiencing chronic shortage of educators.
The unions represented at the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) include Cosatu affiliate the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) and the Combined Trade Union of Autonomous Trade Unions (CTU-ATU).
The CTU-ATU includes the National Professional Teachers' Organisation of SA, the Public Servants Association, Health and Other Services Personnel Trade Union of SA, the National Teachers’ Union, Professional Educators Union and Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysers Unie.
In total, Sadtu has a membership of about 243 000 or 70%, while the CTU-ATU unions share the remaining 30% or almost 106 000 members at the ELRC.
According to the draft agreement, which is up for discussion at the council, R500m has already been transferred to provincial education departments for teacher incentives.
It further states that while the implementation of the agreement will be done by the heads of departments it will be the prerogative of the Basic Education Department director-general Mathanzima Mweli to monitor implementation and progressively intervene in situations where provincial department heads fail to implement its provisions.
The teachers’ incentives policy was declared in January 2008 by then education minister Naledi Pandor but Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga unilaterally withdrew it last year.
Motshekga indicated that measures relevant to the payment of incentives to academically qualified educators who meet the prescribed criteria would be withdrawn from April 1 last year.
“Department of Basic Education has been using a policy that is ambiguous and not used uniformly in all provinces and has done very little to attract and retain teachers in rural institutions and or hard-to-reach areas,” the draft agreement states.
In addition, it notes that teachers are demotivated by low wages, their low status in society, and lack of career advancement, the high pupil teacher/learner ratio, poor working environment, inadequate fringe benefits and irregular payments.
”The policy was failing to define rural, deep rural and hard-to-reach schools ... The policy was also silent on the type of incentive/reward to be paid to teachers,” the draft agreement explains.
Unions also warn that workers in the sector prefer to stay in rural areas due to their family ties. However, many teachers migrate to urban and private schools due to improved incentives, while other were leaving to join other professions that pay better salaries and have better working conditions.
They describe working conditions as being too problematic to recruit and retain teachers in schools, and designing effective strategies to mitigate the exodus of quality and scarce-skilled educators in rural or hard-to-reach areas remains a challenge.
A chronic shortage of educators in certain subject and learning areas such as maths, science, information and communications technology and some languages has been identified.
The policy is expected to cover all educators in rural schools, and for hard-to-reach areas it must identify the subjects.
Qualifying teachers were to be paid the minimum amount of the incentives at 10% of the first notch of salary level seven.