EDUCATION STUDIES
How much interest is there among our school-leavers in becoming teachers? Are we doing enough to recruit young people into the profession? And what is driving young people's choices of profession? This article, based on a study by MICHAEL COSSER and SEKINAH SEHLOLA, Ambitions Revised: Grade 12 Learner Destinations One Year On, addresses these topical questions.
Aspiration and enrolmentA study tracing the destinations of a group of learners who were in grade 12 in 2005 has revealed that 13% of that group enrolled in higher education institutions in 2006. This compares with the 37% who had planned to do so. The aspirations gap - the difference between where learners aspire to be and where they end up - remains large, four years after the first transition study conducted by the HSRC, in which it was found that while 14% of the 2001 cohort enrolled in higher education institutions in 2002, a massive 71% had wanted to do so. Though the aspirations gap narrowed in the 2005/06 study, the gap between enrolments in education and enrolments in other higher education programmes in the 2006 study is enormous. While 30% of those who enrolled in higher education enrolled in business/commerce, 20% in the social sciences, and 15% each in engineering and the natural sciences, only 3% enrolled in an education programme. Still, this is two percentage points higher than the percentage that had planned in 2005 to enrol in an education programme in 2006. Indeed, in the case of both programme preferences and enrolments, this was the smallest percentage of students that had wanted to enrol in, and ended up enrolling in, education studies. Should we be worried? In relation to the size of the teaching profession (the Department of Education is one of the largest public sector employers), and given the importance of teachers as the backbone of the education system and as the mediators of foundational learning in the country, the smallest numbers of programme preferences and actual enrolments (3 709 and 6 439 respectively), were in education. The three strongest influences on student enrolment in education were: ‘The range of career opportunities that a qualification in education opens up' (3.9 on a 5-point Likert-type scale); ‘Being assured of getting a job if you study education' (3.9); and ‘The flexibility that studying education gives you to enter another programme area' (3.8). All three have to do with the extent to which studying education facilitates mobility - possibly away from the teaching profession. For many students, then, education enrolment may simply be a means to other ends. We should be worried. Professional aspiration The picture differs slightly when we consider the professional aspirations of those students in the cohort who enrolled in higher education in 2006. Teaching, we see in Figure 1, occupies a middling position in the hierarchy of aspirations - considerably fewer students plan to enter the teaching profession (9 386) than engineering (41 654) and accounting (35 378). A comparison of student enrolments in education and student aspirations to enter the teaching profession shows that only 2 953 of the students who planned to become teachers were not enrolled in an education programme in 2006 - that is, they were enrolled in another qualification programme (for example, a BA, BSc or BCom) but planned to enter the teaching profession after the attainment of a postgraduate certificate or diploma in education. 
But whether one sets more store by enrolments or professional aspirations, the numbers remain discouraging. Influences on aspirationThe strongest influences on students' decisions to enter the teaching profession were: ‘Wanting to make a difference to the lives of all South Africans through working in the profession'(4.4); ‘A passion for the profession' (4.2); and ‘Wanting to enter the profession since you were young' (4.0). The variables which exerted a noticeably higher influence upon choice of teaching as a profession than upon choice of any of the other professions were the first and third: ‘Wanting to make a difference to the lives of all South Africans through working in the profession'; and ‘Wanting to enter the profession since you were young'. Aspirant teachers' passion for the profession (the second variable above) was surpassed by the passion of aspirant built environmentalists, medical practitioners and accountants for their chosen professions. Teaching, the ‘No, Bill!' profession?As the strongest of the influences on students' decisions to enter the teaching profession suggests, teaching remains the ‘noble' profession alluded to in the following excerpt from Time magazine: If the country wants to pay teachers like professionals - according to their performance, rather than like factory workers logging time on the job - it has to provide them with other professional opportunities, like the chance to grow in the job, learn from the best of their peers, show leadership and have a voice in decision-making, including how their work is judged. Making such changes would require a serious investment by school districts and their taxpayers. But it would reinvigorate a noble profession (C. Wallis, How to make great teachers, Time, 13 February 2008). The juxtaposition of remuneration and nobility in this excerpt suggests that the operative word is not ‘noble' but ‘profession': if teachers behave like professionals, they deserve to be remunerated accordingly. Aspirant teachers are under no illusions about teacher salaries. The amount of money to be made in this profession is ranked far lower by student teachers as a variable exerting an influence on their choice of profession than by students wanting to enter any other profession. But as Wallis's conditional formulation ‘If the country wants to pay teachers like professionals ... it has to provide them with other professional opportunities' suggests, the profession-pay nexus is a vicious circle. Professional behaviour warrants professional remuneration; but what incentive is there besides remuneration in the South African context - where (perversely enough) teaching, one of the only occupations previously open to Africans, has now been eclipsed by a host of others - to inculcate professional behaviour? This would seem to pose a dilemma for the education authorities, who might well be prepared to reward teachers for delivering on key indicators, like improved learner outcomes, but for the fact that teacher salaries already constitute the largest drain on the education fiscus. Differentiating teacher remuneration according to professional behaviour - the logical conclusion to this line of argument - may well be the first step toward acknowledging that inflexibility is not the way to proceed in moving the South African schooling system up the value chain. Ambitions Revised: Grade 12 Learner Destinations One Year On, by Michael Cosser and Sekinah Sehlola (HSRC Press) is available for free download or to order from: http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/. Mr Michael Cosser is a chief research specialist in the programme on Education, Science and Skills Development and Sekinah Sehlola is a research intern in the same programme.
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