School foundations: the role of initial teacher education in primary schooling

The work reflected in these chapters has its origins in the Teacher Demographic Dividend project, the existence of which was motivated by the impending retirement of more than one-third of South Africa’s teaching force over the period 2022 to 2030. It was assumed that all teachers leaving the system would be replaced, an assumption that the research that follows revealed to be incorrect, given the budget restrictions imposed by the Treasury since 2020 and the consequent inability of provinces to replace all teachers retiring or leaving for other reasons. Nevertheless, the optimism reflected in the project title Teacher Demographic Dividend signals an unprecedented opportunity, one that is very rare for any school system, to replace thousands of poorly educated older teachers with better-educated and more energetic young graduates. This is an opportunity that could easily be missed if universities are not up to the task of simultaneously varying the rate of teacher production in response to demand and raising the quality of teacher preparation. The risk, one that will register as probable by pessimistic observers, is that in the next two decades, a large proportion of poorly educated teachers will be replaced by a younger set who are not significantly more effective than those retiring, thus entrenching the production of disappointing learning outcomes for decades into the future. The intention of this book is to outline ways in which this risk may be mitigated, and to identify strategies that could lay the foundation for a high performing school system.