DR SHEETAL BHOOLA

In recent years, South African universities have become stringent about academic staff engaging in professional development programs and qualifications and being appropriately qualified to facilitate teaching and learning, research portfolios, post-graduate supervision, and community service.

Qualifications such as Ph.D. and Master’s degrees have become an essential mandate for academic staff in numerous universities. More than often, individuals are employed whilst still pursuing their doctoral degrees at the lecturer level, and the critical performance assessment measures include mandates which stipulate the completion of the PhD.

Most academic positions advertised nationally and internationally stipulate that the doctoral qualification is mandatory and that the applicant needs to be in the process of attaining the qualification.

The value of the PhD, especially in subject focus areas heavily reliant on research, is that the process develops the lecturer to have increased critical thinking skills and a research expertise area to contribute substantially to research output and knowledge production.

Yet many academic staff are employed at higher educational institutions in South Africa that lack PhD’s and Master’s degrees. The reality of this scenario is intrinsically linked to the lack of national benchmarks and quality assurance assessment procedures, which are dauntingly evident.

Our educational systems have been skewed for a long time and have their origins in the Bantu Educational System, continual class inequalities and varied standards that have been accessible to South Africans. The South African National Qualifications Framework has been pivotal post-apartheid in developing an integrated framework for our educational system to eliminate the irregularities in our system.

Only recently has the Durban University of Technology dismissed academic staff that still did not attain their Master’s degrees but were employed as lecturers for years on end. A recent media briefing indicated that approximately thirty-one academic staff members were dismissed because they had not attained the relevant minimum qualifications to be employed in the Higher Education sector.

The media brief also alerted us that the South African labour court recently mandated that employers can dismiss employees who don’t meet professional development criteria and standards. The Council on Higher Education has been central in the quality assurance of all tertiary educational institutions in the private and public sectors. The council has been active in reinventing and modifying mandates to facilitate the relevancy and applicability of qualifications.

The Durban University of Technology launched a Strategic Direction policy that mandates that all lecturers should have a Masters degree. The institution supports this professional development stance by affording staff study leave periods, research subsidies, and subsidised tuition fees. In the case of the dismissal of these staff members, they were given numerous warnings and a period of almost ten years to complete the qualification.

The outcry against this stance is not even considerable because the role of lecturers at higher educational institutions is to shape young learners' thinking and develop them into responsible citizens who can contribute towards society effectively. Our educators or lecturers can only be in these positions if they are appropriately qualified.

How does a lecturer peruse post-graduate supervision for students pursuing a Master’s degree when they lack the experience of attaining the qualification? In addition, the post-graduate qualification indicates to the student that the lecturer has advanced skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, research-related tasks, and writing skills. These skills can only be recognised and endorsed by attaining a proper qualification.

Lecturers and educators have also been challenged to cope with the new transformative roles of teaching and its purpose. Lecturers are now forced to prepare students for employability globally rather than nationally. The process of knowledge and skill dissemination needs to be effective and impactful.

Many universities have been encouraging their staff members to pursue other professional development programs and qualifications to address this challenge. Many institutions are hosting professional development programs internally, which are customised to teach certain subjects.

Despite this, higher educational institutions have been permissive about underqualified staff teaching future generations of democracy, which is disturbing. The lenient approach has been founded on the skewed educational system that existed during the pre-democratic era. Still, policy and regulations must align more with the present needs of developing a better society through quality education.

This means that lecturers need to be adequately skilled to be in their positions and school teachers are well. Learners and students have minimal learning opportunities when teachers and lecturers are under-qualified. A media report from 2023 also alerted us that learners are only accessing up to 20% of the school curriculum content because teachers are unqualified.

We cannot ignore the human stance that individuals will only teach and articulate content they are confident in and that they understand. If the teachers are unqualified, how can we expect them to comprehend and structurally understand the content they were never taught?

The need for qualified teachers also impacts the learners as they may not be able to progress independently to enter any tertiary educational institution for skills and educational development, which hinders their capacity to earn a better livelihood.

As an employee in the education sector, a key purpose of our role is to ensure that future generations in South Africa are competent individuals who can participate actively in our economy. The only way we can ensure competence is if we are qualified.

There should be a national mandate that reinforces the purpose of appropriate qualifications for all academic and teaching staff in the educational sectors, and mandates should highlight the need for them to be appropriately qualified. The long-term impact of normalising the employment of unqualified teachers and lecturers can harm our society.

Dr Sheetal Bhoola is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Zululand, and the director at StellarMaths (Sunningdale).

The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media or IOL.

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