The education department should ensure that plans to bring hundreds of foreign teachers into the country would not spark xenophobia within the teaching fraternity, MPs said on Tuesday.
Speaking during the department's briefing to the National Assembly committee on Education, ANC MP Richard Ntuli said it was important for teacher unions to be properly consulted on the issue to avoid possible conflict.
"Teacher unions might think that these foreign teachers are taking away jobs from their members," he said.
Education department Deputy Director General Firoz Patel, who earlier told the committee about the department's plans to employ 2000 foreign teachers in the next two years, said the unions were aware that the department was struggling to find suitably qualified teachers, particularly in the maths and science categories.
"We informed the unions and {even requested them} to provide us with people with maths and science. Up to now we have not received a single CV," he said.
Patel disputed government's employee database (Persal) figures showing that there were close to 70 000 vacant posts in the department, saying inaccurate data was being fed into the system.
However, MPs were outraged about the fact that the department still did not have a reliable system in place that could produce accurate numbers.
"This shows that the human resources management of the department is wholly inadequate," ANC MP Ben Mthembu said.
It was pointless for department to roll out programmes to address the teacher shortage problem if it did not know the scale of the problems.
Patel told MPs that all vacant posts had been filled by temporary teachers, and that qualified teachers who would occupy the positions permanently were being recruited.
On the African National Congress's call for the re-opening of teacher colleges which were closed down by government in the 90s, the department's Deputy Director General for General Education and Training Palesa Tyobeka said the matter was still under discussion.
However, she said the department might look at other ways of increasing teacher graduates without necessarily having to re-open the old colleges. - Sapa