Information and Communication Technologies

In South African secondary schools

A monograph in a series focussing on the origins and theories of federalism.

Teachers spend slightly less time on their activities overall, but much less time on teaching than policy requires. There is a serious erosion of instructional time in the majority of schools, but it is worst in rural and semi-rural African schools.

Learning to Teach in South Africa is a collection of key texts by one of South Africas most respected thinkers in education. The essays span the crucial years of democratic transition in South Africa and display the essential unity of the authors thought as he reflects on the idea of epistemological access, a prominent feature of disciplined thinking about education in South Africa, as well as teacher education, the primacy of the practice of teaching in any system of education, and the continuing struggle with relativism, one of the strands of the Apartheid and colonialism legacies. The collection bears the authors hallmark intellectual passion and incisive thinking which has helped sculpt the landscape of educational debates over three decades.

Education plays a key role in the development of any society. Responding to the need for empirical evidence on the demand for and supply of public educators in South Africa, the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) commissioned the Human Sciences Research Council-led consortium to conduct nation-wide research on the factors determining educator supply and demand in South African public education system. Growth demand for educators depends on learner enrolments and the learner-educator ratio, while replacement demand for educators depends on employment trends, demographics and attrition (including morbidity and morality). Educator supply depends on a number of factors, such as education graduates, morbidity and morality, and educators returning after a break from the profession.