The desks are packed with pupils, ready and eager to learn… but there's no teacher. During the first week of the new school year, that's been the situation in scores of classrooms across the province, after the education department cut the contracts of 4 219 teachers.
The desks are packed with pupils, ready and eager to learn… but there's no teacher. During the first week of the new school year, that's been the situation in scores of classrooms across the province, after the education department cut the contracts of 4 219 teachers.
Three Grahamstown schools have been particularly badly affected, with Mary Waters High having lost about a third of its staff, and Nathaniel Nyaluza High and Nombulelo High each being three teachers down. Matrics in these schools now face the bleak prospect of lagging behind in key subjects.
Samuel Wessels, the principal at Mary Waters High, which lost 11 teachers out of a staff of 38, said his school had exhausted all avenues in trying to resolve its shortage of staff. They had pleaded to the local district office to highlight its case in Bhisho, without any luck, Wessels said, and the matrics were without English and History teachers.
"Basically, it's impossible to run a school successfully without a third of your staff," said Wessels. "We cannot continue like this. We are trying to do normal work under abnormal conditions. "How can we improve our matric results, when we start the year on a bad footing?"
Nombulelo High School has had to do without three teachers, including for Grade 12 Economics, and History. Grocott's Mail has previously reported that because of a lack of funds, a staggering 4219 temporary teachers' contracts had been terminated in the Eastern Cape, including in Grahamstown.
The education department is expected to overspend its budget by R800 million by March – the end of the financial year. Spokesperson for the education department, Loyiso Pulumani, said an audit around the province, expected to be finalised by last Friday, would reveal the actual number of enrolled pupils, and thus how many teachers were needed per school. He did not say when the department would re-employ teachers.
"These were temporary educators," Pulumani said, "and their contracts were always on a temporary basis." He said each school would be addressed according to its specific needs. At least one school affected by the temporary teacher cut, TEM Mrwetyana High, has found a way out by sharing out the subjects of axed teachers among those who remained.
