Today is World Teachers Day. It is a day to celebrate excellence in education and renew our commitment to the many hard-working teachers who carry the responsibility of educating future generations. We are grateful for the service they provide and the opportunities that they open up to our children.

Optimism about the teaching profession is often tempered by the challenges facing our education system. Training, placing and retaining excellent teachers, especially in poor areas where the need is the greatest, remains a key challenge. There are good teachers at many schools, but we need good teachers everywhere.

A recent study published by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) titled ‘Value in the Classroom’ (September 2011) established the following:

Too few teachers are being trained, especially in key subjects such as maths and science. We are training a third of the 25,000 new teachers we need annually.
Many of the existing teachers are not teaching well and are also poorly managed. A significant number of mathematics and science teachers are not actually qualified to teach their subject.
There are not enough incentives to train enough young teachers to replace those who have to retire in the course of time.
Our teachers are poorly used. In the Eastern Cape 16, 581 teachers were qualified to teach mathematics but only 7,090 were doing so.
Our teachers, on average, spend too little time in the classroom. Many arrive late, leave early, spend only 46 per cent of their time teaching each week, and hardly teach on Fridays.
Many of our best teachers leave the profession because of poor working conditions, poor career planning and tracking and mediocre school leadership.

These are the hard truths government needs to deal with. Above all, government needs to prioritise putting excellent teachers in front of the classroom. There are many ways we can do this. We can bring great teachers back from retirement, encourage excellent expatriate South African teachers to return home, recruit excellent teachers from countries with an oversupply, and incentivise universities to train more teachers and open more teacher training colleges across the country.

If we did this, we would show teachers that we really do care about them and their profession. Teachers play an essential role in the creation of opportunities for our children, and we should do all we can to support them in this task.