South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) says overcrowding in classrooms and a lack of infrastructure at schools are some of the major challenges teachers are facing.
Sadtu says many schools in the country still don’t have toilets, libraries and laboratories.
This comes a day after the release of the Teaching Learning International Survey (Talis) which surveyed 260 000 teachers from across the world on their working conditions and the learning environment.
Addressing a Sadtu conference in Kempton Park, Johannesburg, Sadtu president Magope Maphila says the results of the survey have vindicated them.
“While we are talking of the ratio of 1 is to 35 and 1 is to 41 we are the biggest in terms of class sizes. Some other countries they speak of 1 is to 15 and 1 is to 20. It also exposed that comparatively. Infrastructure wise, we are still far behind despite the fact that we are one of the luckiest countries in Africa where in the large chunk of the education budget is spent on education.”
