Pretoria - The Department of Basic Education is sitting with thousands of teachers who have no qualifications to teach Grade R pupils.
This is the damning finding by Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu on his state of education report for 2013/14.
The department had not responded to the Pretoria News by the time of going to print on Monday night.
In the report, Makwetu found there were many loopholes that have allowed the department to employ thousands of teachers with no diploma or required qualifications to teach pupils at Grade R level.
The report found a large chunk of pupils, 33.2 percent, were in the foundation phase. This phase covers Grade R to 3.
Makwetu found that in seven of eight provinces half of the teachers did not have qualifications.
The disturbing picture by the AG is also painted in the figures he presented in his report on the state of education.
The auditor-general said education was the largest single consumer of the national budget. The department needed to fix the state of unqualified teachers, he said.
“In 2013, 16 520 of the 21 207 Grade R teachers (78 percent) did not have a diploma to teach at this level, which is the minimum qualification required in terms of the national qualification framework levels,” said Makwetu.
“In seven of the eight provinces more than half the teachers did not have the minimum qualification.”
This was owing to a lack of qualified teachers across the country.
The report found that in the Eastern Cape, 88 percent of the teachers in Grade R were not qualified.
But in Limpopo the situation was more dire, with 100 percent of the Grade R teachers being unqualified.
The auditor-general also found that in KwaZulu-Natal, 83 percent of the teachers in Grade R were unqualified.
The situation was no better in the Northern Cape, as 85 percent of the teachers in that level remained unqualified.
In Mpumalanga things were not looking good either, as 82 percent of the Grade R teachers were unqualified.
In the Western Cape, 66 percent of the teachers at that level also did not have the required qualifications.
The same problem was affecting Gauteng where 56 percent of the teachers were unqualified to teach Grade R class.
In the Free State, 47 percent of teachers did not possess the minimum qualifications to teach pupils at that level, he found. Makwetu called on the government to address this problem.
He said education was one of the priorities of the government with 20 percent - or one-fifth - of the country’s total budget going to education.
Makwetu said in his report there were 425 000 teachers across the country, and they were teaching 12.4 million pupils.
“The highest proportion of learners in South Africa’s ordinary schools were in the foundation phase.
“This was followed by the intermediate phase (22.4 percent) and the senior phase (23.4 percent),” he said in the report. Makwetu said the situation needed to be fixed.
Pretoria News