An overview of research, policy and practice in teacher supply and demand, 1994–2008 docx

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Published by HSRC Press
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First published 2009
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Series preface v
Project preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Executive summary xi
Acronyms and abbreviations xv
1฀฀ Introduction 1
2฀฀ Conceptual฀issues
3

3฀฀ ฀Dynamics฀of฀teacher฀supply฀and฀demand:฀
Research,฀policy฀and฀practice,฀1994—1999
9
4฀฀ ฀Dynamics฀of฀teacher฀supply฀and฀demand:฀
Research,฀policy฀and฀practice,฀1999—2004
17
5฀฀ ฀Dynamics฀of฀teacher฀supply฀and฀demand:฀
Research,฀policy฀and฀practice,฀2004—2008
23
6฀฀ Conclusion
33
References
37
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The Teacher Education in South Africa series is produced as part of the Teacher
Education Programme (TEP), funded by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
from 2005 to 2008.
The programme took place at a critical juncture in the development of teacher education
in post-apartheid South Africa. Since 2004, sustained attention has been given to the
improvement of teacher education consequent on the revision of the curriculum and
the restructuring of higher education. In October 2004, the Council on Higher Education
(CHE) initiated a review of teacher education programmes. On 26 April 2007, a National
Policy Framework for Teacher Education and Development was gazetted. This provided
the basis for a new system of teacher education and development for a new generation of
South African teachers.
The TEP emerged within this overall context of enhanced attention being given

to the improvement of teacher education. Its overall goal was ‘to contribute to the
knowledge and information base for policy formulation and implementation regarding
the organisation and practice of teacher education, with a particular emphasis on
initial teacher education (both pre-service and upgrading), as well as the professional
development of school leaders and managers’ (CEA, CEPD, EFT, HSRC & SAIDE
2005). The work was organised under four major themes: teacher supply and demand;
institutional culture and governance; the development of education management; and
literacy and teacher development.
The programme was designed by a consortium of agencies with considerable expertise
and experience in the field: the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD); the
Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC); the South African Institute for Distance
Education (SAIDE); the Centre for Evaluation and Assessment (CEA) at the University
of Pretoria; and the Education Foundation Trust (EFT).
1
The TEP was developed in
consultation with stakeholders such as the national Department of Education, the
Ministerial Working Group on Teacher Education, the Deans’ Forum and the Council
on Higher Education/Higher Education Quality Committee, among others. Briefing and
consultation continued through the process of research, for the consortium as a whole
and in relation to specific projects.
Michael Cosser, HSRC Organisational Manager, Teacher Education Programme
1 The EFT has been disbanded, and uncompleted projects have been taken over by the consortium.
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In 2008, South Africa had 400 953 educators, which included school teachers and
principals. Were they adequate in number and quality for the 12 239 363 learners in
ordinary public and independent schools? Is the country’s teacher education system
sufficiently geared up to produce the teachers that are required? Are sufficient numbers

of teachers being attracted to teaching, and if not, why not? How have government and
unions attempted to address specific teacher shortages since 1994 and how successful
have these efforts been? What has the contribution of research been in these areas? These
are the questions this monograph addresses. It does so by providing an overview and
synthesis of the interventions, research and consequences of initiatives related to the
demand for and supply of teachers since 1994. As such, it pays particular attention to the
research conducted at the HSRC within the Teacher Education Programme, examining its
contributions to the unfolding debate and situating them within overall trends in research,
policy and practice since 1994.
This monograph first examines conceptual approaches to teacher supply and demand,
and then shows how demand-side strategies combined with the restriction of supply
and the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1990s led to declining enrolments in
teacher education in the early 2000s. A spate of research in the period between 2002 and
2005, as well as reports about declining enrolments, resulted in a number of supply-side
interventions by the state from about 2004. These coincided with a renewed emphasis on
skills supply more generally, and with new demands created not only for more teachers
but also for better teachers by the revision of Curriculum 2005 and the introduction of
the National Curriculum Statement. Significant challenges remain in matching supply with
demand, as demonstrated in the research conducted. This monograph shows how the
HSRC research has contributed to the ongoing and as yet unresolved debate about supply
and demand of teachers and teacher education.
Linda Chisholm, Project Leader
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The generous support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for this project
is gratefully acknowledged.
An early draft of this monograph was presented at the Third Annual Education
Conference at Birchwood, and at seminars convened by the Cape Higher Education
Consortium at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and the Wits School of

Education. I would like to thank all the contributors, and especially Yousuf Gabru, Peter
Kallaway, Dave Gilmour, Yusuf Waghid, Maureen Robinson, Mary Metcalfe, Albert Chanee,
Jane Castle, Francine de Clerque and Spencer Janari for their comments. I have tried to
address questions raised at these seminars to the best of my ability. Rob Turrell, Ivor
Chipkin and Matseleng Allais provided extremely valuable insights and suggestions in
written form. Any errors, omissions or limitations are my responsibility.
My colleagues in the Teacher Education Programme at the HSRC – Fabian Arends,
Michael Cosser, Nolutho Diko and Glenda Kruss – have inspired me with their knowledge
and passion for their work. I am indebted to them for a collegial working environment.
Vijay Reddy has also provided crucial support for my work.
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Background and approach
This monograph provides an integrated synthesis of a study of research, policy and
practice in relation to the supply and demand of South African teachers in three periods:
1994–1999, 1999–2004 and 2004–2008. At the heart of the study is the question of teacher
shortages and the need to match supply with demand so that a sufficient number of
adequately trained teachers are teaching learners the subjects that need to be taught in
schools. Whether or not there are teacher shortages, where they exist and how to address
them are issues that require both research and suitable policy interventions.
The approach taken in this study is that the supply and demand of teachers is affected as
much by the market for teachers as by the character of state interventions in this field. In
essence, the form and size of the market for teachers is, in part, determined by the state
itself. In this regard, getting to the bottom of any mismatch requires more than efforts to
match numbers of teachers required with numbers of teachers supplied by the system,
although this is also important. Crucially, it requires an understanding of interventions
taken by the national and provincial departments of education to address challenges

in education. How they have understood these challenges, the concepts used both
normatively and analytically, and the nature of the interventions are important to fathom.
A number of important assumptions about the relationship between the state and teacher
markets inform this study. First, teacher markets are not free; they exist in complex socio-
economic, political and institutional contexts, conditions and geographies that are shaped
by history and that constrain and enable the parameters of choice and decision-making
related to supply and demand processes. Second, institutions, including the market for
teachers, are constructed politically. The supply, demand and utilisation of teachers is
regulated by state and non-state institutions such as the education sector bargaining
chamber, the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC). To the extent that policies
do not work as expected, the problem is conceptualised not so much as market failure
requiring state intervention, which already exists to regulate the market, but as systemic
failure: on the one hand, in terms of a state that is not yet functioning optimally to ensure
that supply is calibrated with demand, and on the other, a state and a teacher market in
which politics is institutionally structured and shapes outcomes in unpredictable ways.
This critical political economy approach is supplemented by two additional sets of
concepts. Conceptual tools from the education planning literature are used to analyse
and distinguish between the supply and demand of teachers. In this literature, demand
is typically determined by learner enrolments, pupil : teacher ratios (PTRs) and teacher
turnover, whereas supply is assessed by those factors that affect the supply of teachers:
the number of students graduating from teacher preparation programmes, the proportion
of those students who choose to enter teaching, the number of teachers licensed through
alternative programmes, and the number of teachers from the reserve pool of teachers,
including retired teachers. These numbers in turn are influenced by the motivation or
aspiration to become teachers, which in turn is affected by conditions of work.
Interventions can be focused on either the demand side or the supply side; they
correspond to the issues to be considered in terms of each; and they may be either
short- or long-term. Demand-side approaches can be considered in terms of the degree
to which they are implemented through centralised or decentralised processes – here the
discussion loops back to the debate on the nature of the state and its ‘developmental’

capacities. Within supply-side approaches, the short-term measures commonly
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compensate for failures of demand or supply. For social actors such as governments and
unions, the issues are fundamentally linked to education funding, and in practice trade-
offs are often entailed in the decisions taken either to expand or reduce PTRs and to raise
salaries or keep them static.
Using these concepts, the study analyses the nature, focus and efficacy of research, state
interventions and related union activity during three periods: 1994–1999, 1999–2004 and
2004–2008. It draws principally on secondary literature, and especially the Wits Education
Policy Unit (EPU) Quarterly Review of Education and Training produced in the 1990s, but
supplements this with additional primary research, including government documents and
key informant interviews. For each period the study considers the research, policy and
practice (or outcomes) that are relevant to questions of teacher supply and demand.
Demand and supply dynamics, information and policies: 1994–2008
This study argues that in the first period, 1994 to 1999, a preference existed for
redistributional solutions as a way of improving quality in schools instead of investing
in teacher education or re-education. Finances for education were constrained, and the
main priority lay in reorganising and restructuring the education system to unify racially
fragmented budgets, departments and processes. Government teacher policy was driven
by information that proposed demand-led, centralised teacher redeployment rather than
supply-side solutions, although significant policy interventions were made that had
determinate effects in producing a social panic on the supply side by the start of the
millennium. Whereas demand-side research and policies emphasised the reduction of
teacher shortages in African schools through the mechanism of revised PTRs that resulted
in rationalising, redeploying and redistributing teachers within the system rather than
training new teachers, supply-side research and policy emphasised that there was an
‘overproduction’ of teachers in teacher education colleges and the need for restructuring
and incorporating teacher education into higher education. The effects of policy and
practice in this period were felt in the subsequent period. The major outcomes of the

struggles in this first period were marginal salary improvements, the reduction of teacher
numbers in the system and a PTR that aimed at equalisation but did not effectively
translate into smaller classes. The pattern of privileging salaries over class size in teachers’
conditions of work was set in this period.
During the second period, from 1999 to 2004, signs of the limitations of the
redistributional logic began to emerge and there were belated efforts to improve the
supply of teachers. The threat of teacher migration and the effects of the HIV/AIDS
pandemic created a significant social panic about the supply of teachers to schools.
While some HSRC and government-initiated research conducted in and on this period
urged a more sober understanding, the teachers’ unions initiated research under the
auspices of the ELRC that in 2005 reiterated the need for greater attention to supply-side
issues. In response, government initiated policy to improve the quantity and quality of
supply of teachers for both the short and long term. But the cumulative effect of policy
changes since 1994, combined with demand-side dynamics affecting turnover as well as
new demands created by curriculum reform, had by this stage also ratcheted up supply-
side issues influencing the attractiveness of teaching. As a result, the teacher labour
market in this period was in turmoil over shortages. Declining university enrolment,
teacher migration and the impact of HIV/AIDS were cause for a renewed interest in
supply-side measures.
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For the period between 2004 and 2008, it has become evident that despite some
improvement in teacher supply, the legacy of redistributional thinking remained strong.
Major research initiatives were undertaken and government intervened with policies to
stabilise the teacher labour market and improve supply-side interventions for both the
short and long term. But shortages have persisted, and these can be met only through
sustained investment in long-term supply-side solutions and by attending to significant
barriers related to teachers’ conditions of work. An important outcome of a ministerial
committee appointed in the preceding period was the National Policy Framework for
Teacher Education and Development in 2007. It provides for the consolidation and

strengthening of teacher preparation and professional development as a long-term solution
to the problem of teacher supply for the system. But the possibility of meeting actual
demand for more and better teachers is now hampered not only by financing of teacher
education, but also by the low attractiveness of teaching, working conditions and salaries,
as well as the system of teacher deployment, recruitment and retention in place at the
provincial and school levels. Beginner teachers often do not find jobs, teachers defined by
schools as ‘excess’ circulate through the system, and schools and provinces compensate
for perceived difficulties and address short-term interests by appointing temporary, often
unqualified teachers. As time progresses, such teachers become permanent.
The study concludes with a consideration of the place of teachers in national
development strategies and the ability of such coordinated strategies to address the key
challenges identified. Teachers need to figure more strongly in national development
plans, but the limitations of these plans should also be recognised in a context in which
‘developmentalist’ features of the state are missing and capacity issues are pronounced.
Research over the period has reiterated that matching and modelling the supply and
demand of teachers is a complex exercise, the results of which are dependent on the
assumptions used and are limited by the quality of available data. Adequate systems
for collecting and analysing data timeously to inform planning are a long way off; such
systems rely not only on the national and provincial departments of education but on
reliable processes and skilled people within schools and departments who are also in
short supply.
Towards meeting demand
Improvement can be effected in four main areas: information systems, financing of
teacher education, salaries and conditions of work for teachers, and the post-provisioning
system linked to teacher appointment, recruitment and retention. Creaking information
systems do not facilitate already ineffective teacher deployment systems. Inadequate
funding of teacher education does not enhance the capacity of a massively restructured
system to respond adequately to new demands for teachers. Moreover, poor salaries and
incentives do not attract and keep the best teachers in the system. The current system
of teacher appointment and deployment has not led to greater equity. A decentralised

system of teacher appointment is unlikely to improve matters, as the main determinant of
whether the system is centralised or decentralised is leadership and capacity. Ultimately,
administrative rearrangements to centralise or decentralise the system will not necessarily
get at the key political issues at the heart of teacher appointment and deployment.
Nonetheless, improvements can be effected in the functioning of the system.
Put positively, national and provincial governments could focus more on improving
information systems. Treasury and the national Department of Education (DoE) could
work out ways of enhancing direct funding for university-based teacher education to
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increase the possibilities for locally relevant and accessible teacher education in scarce
and critical subjects. The ELRC could consider how teachers’ salaries and class sizes
can both be improved in a manner that will ensure quality teachers and teaching. All
role-players could focus closely on the system of teacher appointment, recruitment and
retention to ascertain who benefits from it and how it could be improved to ensure that
equity is achieved at the same time as schools are able to appoint and retain the teachers
they need. And researchers could try to understand better the tenacity of the conception
of the problem of teacher supply and demand as one of redistribution rather than
investment and expansion. Until we understand and address this appropriately, teacher
education will receive short shrift.
A likely emphasis in the foreseeable future is on expanding teacher numbers and
reducing class sizes. A major priority will be to ensure that teacher salaries and conditions
of work do not deteriorate and, perhaps more importantly, that teachers are appointed to
positions for which they are trained and needed.
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ANC African National Congress
CCERSA Committee of College of Education Rectors of South Africa
CPTD continuing professional teacher development
ELRC Education Labour Relations Council

EPU Education Policy Unit
HIV/AIDS human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome
HSRC Human Sciences Research Council
IPET initial professional education of teachers
NAPTOSA National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa
NSFAS National Student Financial Aid Scheme
NTEA National Teacher Education Audit
PTR pupil : teacher ratio
SADTU South African Democratic Teachers’ Union
UK United Kingdom
Wits University of the Witwatersrand
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Introduction
The intention to reverse the negative effects of apartheid education and provide for
greater access, equity and quality has placed curriculum and teacher policy at the
centre of educational transformation in South Africa. For without teachers who are both
adequate in number and good at what they do, it will not be possible to realise the goals
and ambitions of the society for a high level of education for all. Matching the supply
of teachers with the demand so that there are neither shortages nor an oversupply of
teachers is a major challenge for both researchers and policy-makers. Whereas researchers
map and model potential demand for and supply of teachers, policy-makers are required
to implement the necessary interventions at the right time to ensure a balance in
provision – that is, enough teachers of good quality for all schools. Nonetheless, despite
ongoing research and a raft of policies to ensure greater equity in teacher provision and
higher quality of the teaching corps, the system remains crippled by apparent teacher
shortages on the one hand and poor educational outcomes on the other. The question is

why this is the case, the dimensions of the problem and what to do about it.
The purpose of this study is to cast light on these issues by placing them in historical
perspective. It examines approaches and state interventions related to teacher supply
and demand through an analysis and assessment of the relationship between research,
policy and practice on the subject and how they impact on the supply and demand of
teachers in three phases: 1994–1999, 1999–2004 and 2004–2008. In so doing, the study
draws on a range of primary and secondary sources, including the Wits EPU Quarterly
Review of Education and Training produced during the 1990s, policy documents, minutes
of parliamentary committees, key informant interviews and recent research conducted
especially but not only by the HSRC.
Although the phases distinguished in this study (1994–1999, 1999–2004 and 2004–2008)
correspond to the terms of office of education ministers Sibusiso Bhengu, Kader Asmal
and Naledi Pandor respectively, events during these periods cannot be reduced to their
initiatives. Social dynamics are much more complex than this. Often government ministers
are simply dealing with legacies of previous decades or are implementing what has
been set in motion in earlier years. Their specific roles are important but not decisive in
identifying and shaping key issues, which are much more deeply structured by long-term
economic and political patterns and the actions of succeeding generations in different
contexts. The monograph suggests that in the first, post-apartheid phase, an approach
to teacher supply and demand characterised by an emphasis on redistribution and
efficiency rather than expansion and development manifested itself. Its effects were felt
in the subsequent periods. Even though current initiatives take on teacher education and
development, they continue to be overshadowed by this approach. Its main features will
be sketched in the course of the monograph.
There have also been three main periods of research and policy between 1994 and 2008,
each responding to particular supply–demand issues. In each period there has been
a close link between research and policy: policy at each stage has been informed by
available research on supply and demand, despite acknowledged weaknesses in the actual
data. Policy at each stage has also responded in a piecemeal way to recommendations
whose scope invariably reaches well beyond the capacity of either the state or the DoE

on its own to address them. Even when gazetted, recommendations flowing from research
can remain unimplemented. Another complicating factor is the fact that research is often
commissioned in one period while the findings only become available when the pressures
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of that period may no longer be present. Findings reintroduce issues as relevant that may
have been addressed in legislation and interventions, but whose results are not yet clear.
Thus, new policies and interventions can come into being on the basis of inadequate
information. A key example is the call for the reopening of teacher education colleges.
This call for new institutions is based in part on outdated information, in part on systemic
failures of the teacher allocation and distribution system and in part on inadequate funding
for teacher education at university level.
Before discussing the specific issues in these three periods, it is important to examine
how supply and demand issues are understood and the approach taken in this study.
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Conceptual issues
In analysing the problem of mismatch between teacher supply and demand, it is
important to understand the relationship between state and market. Studies on the supply
and demand of teachers have been conducted in an ongoing manner since at least 1994.
Underlying the language of ‘supply and demand’ is the concept of the market. The market
analogy is implicit in and assumed in discussions of teacher supply and demand, and yet
this analogy is often fallacious.
Within the neoclassical conception of the economy, markets are seen as responsible
for distributing production and consumption by determining price and quantity. In this
conception, government interventions can be designed as corrective measures where
markets fail (Gastrow 2009). A market can function properly to set price and quantity only
if individuals can access relevant information that will help them make decisions. This

assumes that flows of information are transparent and that individuals are in a position
to access them. Where information flows are far from complete, resulting in significant
misallocations, ‘market failure’ refers to substantial dysfunctionality. Adequate market
information is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a functioning market. When
requirements are not communicated, market signals are seen as failing (Gastrow 2009).
In the case of the supply and demand of teachers, there are differences between how
classical markets and markets in skills operate (Gastrow 2009).

First, students and teachers
are not commodities; second, the lead time it takes to become a teacher or student is
not the same as that for a commodity in a market; third, conceptions of ‘production’ and
‘consumption’ of skills differ from those regarding commodities in a market. Last but
not least, the understanding of supply and demand at the micro-level of teachers has
taken different and specific forms, to be discussed below. Nonetheless the use of the
terminology lends to the debate the assumptions underlying neoclassical economics –
that individuals will make rational choices about their future depending on whether or
not they receive the right information or signals about market demand. It also suggests
an analogy between government intervention to correct market failure and efforts by the
state to match supply with demand. Within this framework, teacher shortages can be seen
as a sign but not the cause of the fact that teacher markets are failing.
But this framework is not adequate to enable a full understanding of the dynamics that
shape the persistent inability to achieve the right quantity, balance, mix or distribution
of teachers in schools. It ignores the real, often conflictual social relations within which
individuals and markets are situated, as well as the regulative role of state and non-state
institutions. Neither individuals nor markets are free, nor do they operate rationally. They are
situated within complex socio-economic, political and institutional contexts, conditions and
geographies shaped by history. These constrain and enable the parameters of choice and
decision-making, and they are critical to an analysis of failure to balance supply and demand.
Here the debate about the developmental state is relevant. Many state actors argue
that more coordinated intervention by the state should be able to address market

imperfections. But there are problems with this notion that can be better understood by
examining how the debate has unfolded in South Africa.
The notion of a state that intervenes and coordinates where markets have failed arose in
the context of the critique by what became known as the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’
of the ‘Washington Consensus’ of the 1980s and 1990s. The Washington Consensus
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was characterised by the perception of clear boundaries between states and markets: it
envisaged a key role for the market, a diminished and minimal role for the state, and
structural adjustment of expenditure through a policy package consisting of reduction
of the public service, cutbacks in social services, trade liberalisation, and privatisation.
Politics was seen as essentially inimical to the pure operation of markets, and the task
of the state was to minimise such influence wherever and however possible. The Post-
Washington Consensus sought to correct this negative view of the role of the state
and politics in development, seeing complementarity of states and markets where
neoclassicists saw the primacy of the market (Fine 2006; Hart 2002, 2004, 2006; Jomo &
Fine 2006). Within this approach, an institutional political economy school of thought (not
to be confused with institutional theory) has questioned the boundary between states and
markets, arguing that what is considered ‘market failure’ or ‘interventionist’ in one context
may not be so in another and that this depends on the nature of rights – obligations that
are established in the society and that condition markets. This approach promotes the
essentially constitutive role of all markets by states and politics. In this view, the market is
one institution among many; it is a political construct; and politics is itself institutionally
structured (Chang 2002). Thus, markets cannot be analysed without reference to the
complex institutional framework within which they exist or to the integral role of politics
in shaping them. This approach informs the analysis undertaken in this study.
The debate on the developmental state in South Africa proceeds from the assumption that
South Africa in the post-1994 years shared the market-friendly, neo-liberal Washington
Consensus described above. This was manifest in the GEAR (Growth, Employment and

Reconstruction) programme embarked on in the mid-1990s, which committed South Africa
to a conservative economic and fiscal stance. From the early 2000s, corresponding with
improved prospects of economic growth, the state appeared to be espousing a more
‘developmentalist’ and interventionist course (Southall 2007). And yet this periodisation of
market-based development followed by more interventionist approaches is flawed, as it is
clear that state intervention helped to shape the market as well as the economic growth
and development path of South Africa during the 1990s. The market (or economy) did
not reign unfettered and outside a broader state and institutional context.
Recent research on the state and bureaucracy in South Africa has drawn attention to
the non-developmental aspects of the state, recognising that the conditions identified
as existing in successful developmentalist states such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
do not exist in South Africa (Evans 1995). Here, despite some ‘pockets of excellence’,
institutional failure, marked by high turnover rates, vacancies, dysfunctionality and
incapacity, are characteristic of state institutions (Chipkin 2008; Southall 2007; Von Holdt
forthcoming). One of the features of this failure is the disproportionate focus by analysts
‘on developmental policies rather than on the internal functioning of the state’ (Von
Holdt forthcoming). In some instances, this mirrors the emphasis within the state and
bureaucracy on elaboration of development strategies and coordination mechanisms
which ultimately have little consequence or effect. For Chipkin (forthcoming), the state is
better conceptualised in this instance not as a ‘developmental’ state, but as ‘a constellation
of apparatuses, institutions and bodies’ that are simultaneously linked and delinked from
one another, and in which the politics of the nationalist movement is critical in shaping its
form and effects.
The role of both state and non-state institutions has been important in shaping policy
and practice on teacher supply and demand. Within government, Treasury and the
departments of education have been important. Outside but including government, the
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ELRC has been critical. And outside the state, unions have been central. Their impact is

best understood through tracing their relationship to demand- and supply-side research
and interventions over time since 1994. In order to do this, it is necessary to understand
the way in which ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ are conceptualised in the education planning –
and specifically the teacher policy – context.
The demand for teachers is commonly understood as being shaped by three main issues:
pupil enrolment, PTRs and teacher turnover. For example, more teachers are needed
if more pupils enrol. High PTRs will require fewer teachers, whereas low PTRs will
require more teachers. Teacher turnover, considered the most important factor of all, can
result from burn-out, death or illness (such as HIV/AIDS) and places constant pressure
on recruitment of new stocks of teachers. Policy-driven changes to expand access to
education will increase the demand for teachers, as will curriculum reforms and changing
opportunities and conditions in teaching relative to other professions (Cooper & Alvarado
2006; Peltzer et al. 2005; Wagner 1995). The demand for teachers may be for larger
numbers of teachers or for more skilled and qualified teachers or for both. In developing
countries, education-for-all policies can and have expanded enrolments and the
subsequent demand for teachers. In South Africa, the introduction of a new curriculum
has created demand for more highly skilled and knowledgeable teachers.
Whether this demand is met depends on those factors that affect the supply of teachers:
the number of students graduating from teacher preparation programmes; the proportion
of those students who choose to enter teaching; the number of teachers licensed through
alternative programmes; and the number of teachers from the reserve pool of teachers,
including retired teachers. These numbers in turn are influenced by those factors ‘that
affect the career decisions of potential teachers, current teachers and former teachers’
(Cooper & Alvarado 2006: 5). Here the key determinants of the supply of teachers are
‘salaries and working conditions for teachers relative to those in other occupations, and
the cost of preparing to become a teacher relative to the cost of preparing for other
occupations’ (Murnane 1995: 317). The attractiveness of teaching is linked, especially
in developing countries, to perceived living and working conditions. In developing
countries, the overall supply of adequate numbers of teachers may be the key issue; in
more developed countries, the inadequate supply of teachers for specific fields such as

mathematics and science may be critical. In South Africa, the demand for mathematics,
science and Foundation Phase teachers, especially in the mother tongue, has increased
significantly since 1994, but the supply has lagged behind.
Strategies to address mismatches have focused on either ‘supply-led’ or ‘demand-led’
policies, depending on whether research has shown the supply or the demand to be
the main problem. More recently, the focus has been on integrated, cross-sectoral and
coordinated national development strategies.
Among supply-led approaches there are short-term, quick-fix solutions and longer-term,
more sustainable solutions. Short-term, quick-fix solutions may – and in practice often
do – involve the employment of unqualified teachers or substitute teachers. Longer-term
policies include improving teacher preparation programmes; providing incentives that
improve the attractiveness of teaching, such as scholarships and loans for students who
otherwise could not afford to go into teacher education; and improving teacher salaries,
benefits and working conditions (Cooper & Alvarado 2006; Murnane 1995). Other supply-
led strategies include bonuses for teachers in fields of shortage, such as mathematics, or
for those teaching in rural areas.
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Demand-led strategies to increase or decrease the number of teachers attempt to
influence pupil enrolments and PTRs. These in turn are closely linked to education
funding policy. As Carnoy (1996) has pointed out, developing countries faced with
financial constraints in the 1980s and 1990s tended to trade off PTRs against salaries. The
lower the PTRs and the smaller the classes, the greater the number of teachers that are
needed. The more teachers that are needed, the lower the salaries will be – particularly
if countries are operating within constrained budgets. The higher the PTRs and the larger
the classes, the higher the salaries can be, as fewer teachers can command higher salaries.
Those countries with larger classes thus tend to have higher teacher salaries compared
with those who have smaller classes and therefore lower teacher salaries. In this context,
it is important in the narrative that follows to highlight state and union strategies and

approaches and the trade-offs that seem to have been arrived at in South Africa. The
link with supply and demand of teachers is that if the choice has been to go for higher
salaries, classes have remained large and the training and recruitment of additional
teachers have been sacrificed. On the other hand, if the focus has been on smaller
classes and lower salaries, then training new cohorts of teachers will have been a focus.
In reality, these choices and trade-offs are rarely consciously made and both state and
unions will seek to achieve all desirable objectives. In practice, however, some choices
and trade-offs prevail over others, as this study seeks to tease out.
Looked at in this way, it is clear that supply and demand issues are closely linked:
tinkering with demand-led strategies will inevitably influence the available supply and
the match between the two. What this means is that there is a permanent and unstable
dynamic between the supply and demand of teachers: the balance is continuously
affected by the outcomes of state–union negotiated positions within the framework of
overall budget envelopes, as well as the short- and long-term effects of policies, local
labour market conditions, institutional practices and social attitudes towards teaching that
may shift and change for various reasons (Cooper & Alvarado 2006).
The education planning literature links demand-led strategies to either centralised
or decentralised market-based systems for the deployment of teachers (Kelleher
2008). Centrally planned systems are organised from national and provincial levels of
government and are justified on the grounds that they provide for the fair and rational
distribution of teachers. In the South African context, the argument would also be that
the means are justified by the ends: equity. According to Kelleher, the ‘greatest drawback’
of centralised systems is their inability to respond quickly to local-level needs, and their
vulnerability to nepotism and corruption where they also include transfer systems (2008:
59). ‘Market systems’ do not deploy teachers through a central system, but allow teachers
to apply to schools on the basis of their choice. This system commonly prevails in the
private sector; both schools and teachers have greater autonomy in this process, and it is
more likely that immediate needs will be met. The drawback here is that inequalities can
be reinforced as teachers will be lured away from unattractive teaching locales. Analysing
four cases from the Commonwealth, Kelleher concludes that ‘as a long-term approach,

transfers are problematic because they create destabilised systems’ (2008: 69). Kelleher
argues for decentralised systems that ‘potentially include well-planned, targeted training
and recruitment and teacher incentives that tackle the challenge of poor/untimely pay,
housing and travel allowances’ (2008: 69).
Although this provides a useful heuristic model, whether the systems are centralised or
decentralised is not a guarantee of their effectiveness or indicative of where power and
decision-making actually lies. Changing the administrative systems to make them more
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or less centralised will not necessarily lead to improved results. What is important in
either a centralised or decentralised system is the nature of leadership, ‘precisely one of
the scarcest resources in developing countries, and even in developed countries’ (Carnoy
2008: 21). ‘The bottom line’, argues Carnoy, ‘is that decentralisation of management can
work well in countries where there is already sufficient capacity at the local level to
allocate resources efficiently and to produce effective education’ (2008: 22). The corollary
is that where leadership and capacity are in short supply, neither centralisation nor
decentralisation provides the magic bullet for effective or improved systems.
The concepts elaborated in this chapter are used in the analysis that follows to show that
between 1994 and 1999, government teacher policy was driven in part by information that
proposed demand-led, centralised teacher redeployment rather than expanded supply-
side solutions. From 1999, supply-side panics were fuelled by evidence of declining
enrolments, teacher migration and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Research and policy initiated
in this period drew attention to the need for supply-side interventions, and these were
introduced in the third period, from 2005 onwards. Underlying all three periods was a
centralised, finance-driven approach to education reform that shaped negotiations over
key supply and demand issues and the parameters of what could be done in practice.
In the period when demand-side and redistributional strategies were dominant, the
outcome of state–union negotiations can be seen in improved teacher salaries without an
expanded teacher corps. The PTR was set and a post-provisioning model agreed upon.

Teacher education and training and recruitment of new cohorts of teachers were the
price that was paid. Once agreed-upon PTRs were in place, emphasis shifted to supply,
with both state and unions playing a key role in promoting research highlighting the
need for supply-side interventions and changes in the PTRs, all of which would have
effects on salaries. However, all this was at a time when the economy was buoyant, and
growth stood at an average of 5 per cent. As the economy shrank and officially entered a
recession, the gains made in earlier years were poised to be challenged. We now proceed
to a detailed investigation of each period.
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Dynamics of teacher supply and
demand: Research, policy and
practice, 1994–1999
After 1994, it would have been possible to engage in a major process of education
and re-education of teachers. Yet this did not happen. Instead, processes linked to
redistributional understandings of how to address the legacy of teacher shortages and
quality bequeathed by apartheid prevailed. This chapter will trace these processes, while
succeeding chapters will examine the consequences and continuing impact of this way of
thinking about the issues.
The quantity, quality and location of teacher education under apartheid were shaped not
by an overall national plan, but ‘by the need to maintain racial and ethnic segregation’
(Sayed 2004: 247). This in its own way was a centralised national plan. Teacher education
institutions in South Africa developed in a haphazard way out of mission schools,
universities and a host of local and regional initiatives, but from the 1960s onwards were
more forcefully planned and segregated along the lines of race and ethnicity. Control was
divided between universities and provinces; on the whole, students intending to become
primary school teachers trained at racially segregated colleges of education, and would-be
secondary school teachers trained at segregated universities.

Colleges of education proliferated from the 1960s, when the apartheid state used them
to control and divert African aspirations and advancement from urban areas by locating
higher education institutions in the ‘homelands’ or ‘bantustans’. Thus, it was hoped
the graduates would staff ‘homeland’ bureaucracies and schools in these economically
unviable areas. High enrolments in education colleges during the apartheid period
resulted partly because positions in the formal economy were limited and partly because
they provided the possibility for some form of higher education (Crouch 2002; Sayed
2004). Limited supply relative to actual demand was also influenced by ‘the amount
of money the various departments of education were willing to spend on subsidies to
universities and technikons and budgets for colleges’ (Parker 2002: 21).
From the perspective of policy-making processes dominated by higher education
constituencies and cost considerations, the condition of colleges in the mid-1990s was
not positive. Although many colleges, especially those serving white, Indian and coloured
students, developed relationships with universities, they were on the whole considered
to be junior partners in these arrangements. The pecking order was clear. As change
became imminent, college rectors from these institutions formed their own organisation,
the Committee of College Education Rectors of South Africa (CCERSA), to anticipate and
respond to change. Some colleges in rural areas were part of this process, others not.
College staff members were mostly unionised – some belonging to the associations that
came to form the National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa (NAPTOSA),
but many also belonging to the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) (Dave
Balt, interview, 28 April 2009; Jon Lewis, email, 30 April 2009; see also Govender 2004).
By the mid-1990s, some colleges were internally better equipped than others to respond to
change. While a few colleges in rural areas were ‘showpieces in the dust, with manicured
lawns and fountains’, many were also ‘quite rotten, with grass higher than you could see
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