When teachers can’t teach: A call for change

South African learners are failing, and our teachers are in crisis. It’s time for an honest national conversation about the systemic barriers that prevent teachers from doing what they were trained to do - teach.

The phrase “teachers can’t teach” might alarm parents, particularly those paying school fees with the expectation of quality education. But the claim doesn’t reflect a lack of skill or commitment. It reflects a system that has made teaching nearly impossible.

Spend time in any staffroom and you’ll hear the same refrain: “I just want to teach.” The reasons are remarkably consistent, from the poorest government schools to elite private institutions. Administrative demands like: assessment recording, compliance paperwork, curriculum mapping, reporting, and email correspondence, consume the time needed for meaningful lesson planning. Add to this constant interruptions, co-curricular duties, policy changes, discipline management, covering for absent colleagues, marking, counselling and justifying decisions to parents. Teaching and learning, paradoxically, receive the least protected time in schools. This is not a failure of will. It is a failure of design.

At the same time, teachers are expected to prepare children for a future no one can predict. They are tasked with cultivating creativity, collaboration and critical thinking through technologies and coding languages that may be obsolete within years, while foundational skills like logical reasoning, reading comprehension, and problem-solving still form the bedrock of learning. Yet teachers are increasingly judged on their integration of artificial intelligence rather than on whether children can read and count. The metrics have shifted, but the human brain has not.

Teaching is also intensely emotional work. Teachers are expected to regulate the emotional climate of their classrooms, ensuring children are never disappointed, frustrated or anxious. The dominant expectation is that school should make children “happy”, yet real learning requires discomfort. The gap between not knowing and knowing is bridged through effort, not entertainment. When we insist on constant comfort, instruction becomes diluted, unchallenging and ultimately disengaging. Teachers are criticised whether they push learners forward or hold back. There is no safe path.

Meanwhile, teacher wellbeing barely registers as a concern. Burnout and early exit from the profession are now global phenomena. Research shows that teachers are not primarily motivated by salary. What sustains them is meaningful relationships with learners, visible impact on a child’s development, and professional growth. Yet the modern school environment increasingly stifles all three. Trust between parents and teachers has eroded. Staffrooms are siloed. Learners, navigating fragmented authority at home and online, struggle to engage respectfully with adults. Teachers possess highly transferable skills, and many are quietly leaving for roles that value those skills without the emotional toll.

The erosion of the school-home partnership compounds every one of these pressures. Families under strain, often unknowingly, place expectations on schools that extend far beyond academics. Teachers are asked to supervise children online and offline, manage trauma, anxiety, addiction and depression, and regulate the emotional lives of large groups, frequently without access to counsellors or psychologists. In overcrowded classrooms with insufficient training and no additional staffing, inclusive education’s promise of individualised learning becomes an impossible standard. Expectations expand -  resources do not.

Technology has made things worse, not better. Screens have shortened attention spans and shrunk vocabularies. Tolerance for uncertainty and sustained thinking is low. Cyberbullying, social media conflict and digital addiction enter classrooms daily, reshaping behaviour faster than schools can adapt. Teachers are expected to compete with dopamine-driven entertainment using chalk and conversation.

The result is that schools are increasingly perceived as places of supervision rather than education. Teachers are held responsible for outcomes they lack the authority or conditions to deliver. They are targeted rather than supported, and their capacity for sustained pressure is finite. Many have reached their limit.

This is not a story of teacher failure. It is a story of systemic overload. If we want teachers to teach and children to learn, we must make some difficult collective decisions. We need to strip back the administrative burden so that lesson planning takes priority over paperwork. We need to restore the authority and trust that teachers require to do their jobs. We need parents and schools to function as genuine partners, not adversaries. And we need to be honest about what we are asking one profession to carry on behalf of an entire society.

Teachers are not the problem. But if we continue to treat them as though they are, we will lose the very people on whom our children’s futures depend.

Alison Scott, executive head of Bellavista School and Bellavista S.H.A.R.E