SAâs maths teacher shortage: The numbers, and what could actually fix it

This story has significance for readers across Africa and beyond.

South Africa just posted its highest-ever matric pass rate, 88% for the Class of 2025, up from 87.3% the year before. Thatâs a real achievement: itâs the largest matric class in the countryâs history, over 900,000 candidates, and the improvement reached even the weakest-performing provinces. But look closer at the mathematics numbers and the picture changes. Only 34% of candidates wrote maths at all, and among those who did, the pass rate dropped from 69% in 2024 to 64% in 2025, a five-point fall in a single year, while almost every other subject moved the other way.

That contradictionâ a record year overall, alongside a smaller and weaker maths groupâ points to something specific: this isnât a case of learners simply struggling with a difficult subject on their own. Itâs a teacher problem. And as the numbers below show, itâs as much about where teachers end up as how many of them there are.

How big is the shortfall?

The size of the gap shows up more clearly in graduation numbers than in pass rates. South Africaâs teacher training institutions produce around 15,000 new teachers a year, against a widely cited need of roughly 25,000 to keep a healthy teacher-to-pupil ratio. Meanwhile, between 18,000 and 22,000 teachers leave the profession every year, so for years now, the system has been losing qualified staff faster than it can replace them.

That loss isnât slowing down. Late in 2025, Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube told Parliament that more than 30,000 teachers had resigned or been dismissed from public schools over the previous five years, around 6,000 a year, driven by retirement, career changes, emigration and burnout. A year before that, her predecessor had already flagged over 31,000 vacant teaching posts nationally, a 28% jump in just three years.

Nearly half of the current teaching workforce is 50 or older, so the wave of retirements the sector has been warned about since the mid-2010s is now arriving more than half of all teachers are expected to retire by 2030.

Mathematics and physical sciences are consistently classified as scarce-skill subjects in South Africa, and the shortage of qualified teachers in both is most acute in rural areas, compounded by geographic isolation, historic under-resourcing, and the reluctance of qualified teachers to relocate to under-resourced schools. The effect is now visible at school level: nearly 500 of South Africaâs 22,381 public schools no longer offer core mathematics, mostly because they simply couldnât staff it, offering mathematical literacy instead, which closes the door to STEM-related university study before learners even reach Grade 10.

The supply paradox: why a shortage and unemployed teachers exist side by side

Hereâs the detail that complicates the usual shortage story: South Africa isnât simply short of qualified maths teachers overall. As of September 2024, 23,353 qualified teachers were registered as unemployed on the Departmentâs National Recruitment Database, even as schools reported being unable to fill maths and science posts.

At the same time, the absorption rate of Funza Lushaka bursary graduates has collapsed. Funza Lushaka is the governmentâs flagship teacher-training bursary; it covers the full cost of a B.Ed degree, specifically in subjects flagged as being in shortage, on condition that graduates teach in a public school for the same number of years they were funded. In other words, these are teachers the state has already paid to train and already committed to place. Yet the share actually absorbed into teaching posts after graduating fell from 83% in 2019 to just 17% in 2024.

Put those two numbers together and you get a problem that isnât only about training enough teachers, itâs about getting the ones we already have into the classrooms that need them. Provinces and districts donât always have a working system to match a newly qualified maths teacher in one area with an actual vacancy in another. Posts get frozen or delayed for budget reasons even where the need is clearly documented. And placement can be slow enough that graduates take a job outside teaching rather than wait around.

A shortage thatâs part production and part distribution needs different fixes for each. Training more teachers on its own wonât close a gap thatâs also about getting the teachers we already have into the right classrooms.

The equity dimension:

Not all shortages are equal

The shortage isnât felt evenly either. A 2025 Gauteng City-Region Observatory study of Grade 10 enrolments found that in quintile 1 to 3 schools, the no-fee schools serving the provinceâs poorest communities, more than 90% of learners are enrolled in mathematical literacy instead of pure mathematics, against a provincial average of 80.1% across all quintiles. That gap tracks resourcing directly: poorer schools are the ones least able to attract and keep scarce-subject specialists, so they default learners into the lower-demand subject rather than scheduling a maths class with no teacher at all.

This isnât a new pattern; it has a long history. Apartheid-era education policy deliberately under-resourced schooling for Black South Africans, including maths and science provision, and those spending and infrastructure gaps have never fully closed. Three decades on, the same pattern still predicts which learners get access to a maths teacher and which get steered away from the subject altogether. So the teacher shortage isnât just a numbers problem; itâs a distribution problem sitting on top of a much older equity problem, and any solution that doesnât take that into account risks making the gap wider, not narrower.

Why the pipeline keeps leaking

A few things are compounding each other here:

Learner numbers grew faster than teacher supply: Enrolment climbed steadily through the 2010s while initial teacher training output didnât keep pace, particularly in scarce-skills subjects like maths, science and technology.

Learners drop the subject along the way: Only about 34% of the 2025 matric group wrote mathematics; most learners who start the subject in Grade 10 drop it before Grade 12, usually switching to mathematical literacy. Some of that is schools steering learners away to protect their pass-rate numbers; some is a genuine shortage of teachers able to carry them through.

The real completion rate is much lower than headline pass rates suggest: Following the group that started Grade 1 in 2014 through to matric in 2025, Prof Kathija Yassim of the University of Johannesburg puts the true completion-and-pass rate closer to 58%, once you account for dropout and repetition along the way, a reminder that matric statistics describe the learners who made it through the system, not the system as a whole.

Working conditions are pushing existing maths teachers out, not just retiring ones. Overcrowded classrooms, a national average of around 31 learners per teacher, higher in provinces like KwaZuluâNatal, combined with heavy admin loads and burnout, are cited repeatedly by unions and the Public Servantsâ Association as reasons teachers resign, not just retire.

Teacher training itself has gaps. Research tracking first-year education students has found that many arrive with weak basic maths skills themselves, which limits how well distance and contact programmes can prepare them to teach the subject with confidence once they qualify.

Whatâs being proposed, and what tends to actually work

Thereâs no shortage of diagnosis in South African education policy circles; the harder question is which interventions actually move the needle. A few keep coming up as the more credible ones:

Funded, service-linked scholarships

for maths-specialist teacher training

Programmes that fully fund a teaching degree in mathematics tackle the graduation shortfall directly, rather than hoping general teacher supply eventually trickles into scarce subjects.

Teachers Plus NPC, an initiative of the Polyoak Packaging Group, runs the Advancing Professional Teaching (APT) Scholarship Programme, a comprehensive five-year partnership that supports aspiring mathematics teachers from their first year of study through to graduation and entry into the profession.

While the programme fully funds a Bachelor of Education (BEd) degree through Unisa or NWU, its impact extends far beyond financial support. Teachers Plus delivers a structured teacher development programme alongside studentsâ academic studies, providing specialised mathematics training, professional skills development, mentorship, psychosocial support and wellness interventions.

This holistic approach equips graduates not only to complete their degrees successfully, but to emerge as confident, resilient and outstanding mathematics teachers across the Foundation, Intermediate and Senior Phases. The scholarship is deliberately targeted at students from under-resourced backgrounds, low-income households and previously disadvantaged communities.

By investing in talented aspiring teachers who may otherwise have limited access to higher education opportunities, the programme seeks to expand the pipeline of high-quality mathematics educators while increasing the likelihood that graduates will contribute their skills in the communities where they are needed most.

The programme supports 35 students actively studying, alongside 27 alumni, 93% of whom are in the classroom today, together reaching an estimated 2,000 learners a year. Itâs one of several NPOs and NPCs working this same problem from different angles. While each oneâs reach is small on its own, added together they matter, because each is adding supply exactly where the gap is worst.

Fixing placement, not just production

Given that Funza Lushaka absorption fell from 83% to 17% in five years, a real share of the fix has to be administrative, not academic: faster, better-coordinated placement of graduates who are already qualified into the vacancies that already exist, and unfreezing scarce-subject posts before qualified candidates give up and leave the profession before theyâve even started.

Targeting resources at

quintile 1-3 schools specifically

Because the pull from mathematics toward mathematical literacy is steepest in the poorest schools, any intervention that isnât deliberately weighted toward no-fee schools risks reinforcing the same old pattern instead of correcting it. Scarce-subject incentives, placement priority and scholarship service commitments all do more for equity when theyâre pointed at quintile 1â3 vacancies first.

A dual-registration safety net for learners on the cusp

For learners sitting at or below roughly 50% in mathematics, allowing them to write both mathematics and mathematical literacy in Grade 11 and Grade 12, instead of forcing an early switch, the moment a mark dips, would keep far more learners in mathematics for longer. Mathematical literacy would sit as an eighth subject, with its portfolio and practical assessment requirements completed outside regular maths lessons and core school time, scheduled around whatever slot suits the learner best. That gives borderline learners a genuine fallback if their maths mark doesnât hold up, without forcing them to give up on mathematics pre-emptively the way the system currently pushes them to. It also removes the incentive for schools to nudge learners out of maths early to protect their pass-rate numbers, since thereâs no longer a hard trade-off between the two subjects.

Recruiting and formalising

migrant teacher pathways

South Africa already relies on migrant teachers to fill scarce-subject gaps. Researchers have argued for a more deliberate strategy here, recruiting from neighbouring countries in the short term while building longer-term domestic capacity, rather than treating migration as a stopgap nobody planned for.

Retention, not just recruitment

Given that attrition (18,000-22,000 teachers a year) roughly matches or beats annual graduate output, fixing the shortage means slowing the outflow as much as growing the inflow. That points toward smaller class sizes, less non-teaching admin work, and salary and career-progression incentives specifically for scarce-skills subjects, rewarding people for staying in maths classrooms, not just for walking into one.

Pairing training pipelines

with retention-focused fellowships

Getting more mathematics teachers qualified solves only half the problem if a meaningful share of them leave the profession within their first few years. The transition from lecture theatre to classroom is where South Africa loses a lot of ground: newly qualified teachers are routinely placed in under-resourced schools with little structured support, expected to perform at the same level as colleagues with a decade of experience, and left to either sink or swim largely on their own. A training pipeline that stops the moment a graduate receives their qualification is only doing part of the job.

Teachers Plus builds this in by design. Support doesnât end when a student graduates with their BEd. Alumni and other in-service teachers continue to receive training and mentoring, precisely because producing a qualified mathematics teacher and keeping that teacher in the classroom are two different problems that need two different kinds of support.

This isnât a Teachers Plus-only idea. The Western Cape Primary Science Programme (PSP) runs its Joint Mentorship Project (JMP) purely for this purpose: a two-year structured mentorship cycle, developed with the University of the Western Cape and the Western Cape Education Department, aimed squarely at first-time teachers in their most vulnerable years. PSP doesn't fund anyoneâs degree; its whole model is built around the retention half of the pipeline, which is a useful proof point in its own right: even organisations with no involvement in initial training see enough value in structured, sustained mentoring to build an entire programme around it.

The implication for the sector is straightforward. Training pipelines and retention-focused fellowships shouldnât be thought of as alternative interventions competing for the same funding; theyâre complementary parts of the same fix. An organisation doesnât need to do both to be effective, but the sector as a whole needs both happening, ideally in coordination, if South Africa is going to keep the mathematics teachers itâs investing in training.

Strengthening subject-content knowledge within teacher training itself, particularly on the distance-education routes, will help ensure a maths qualification on paper reliably means confident maths teaching in the classroom.

More schools run their

own internship pipelines

Beyond centrally funded scholarships, schools building and funding their own intern pipelines is a proven model in its own right. Several schools across South Africa take student teachers into their classrooms full-time for the length of their degree, most paying the students a stipend, and some going further to cover living costs and tuition too, so students learn from and alongside experienced, practising teachers, not only in a lecture hall. Teachers Plus has already seen the value of this firsthand: schools of this kind have partnered with us in Cape Town to give our student teachers exactly this kind of hands-on, in-classroom experience, and weâre able to place mathematics interns with other schools in Cape Town looking to do the same.

This is exactly the approach the Department of Basic Education, the Department of Higher Education and Training, and a coalition of NGOs and universities are now trying to formalise and scale nationally through the Teacher Internship Collaboration South Africa (TICZA) initiative, which treats structured, mentored classroom placement as a core part of initial teacher training rather than an optional add-on (Zenex Foundation / JET Education Services, TICZA). Thereâs research behind the logic, too: a 2024 South African study following mathematics student teachers found that structured pre-service classroom experience significantly improved their subject knowledge, confidence, and ability to teach curriculumâaligned contentâ exactly the kind of practical grounding a lecture-only pathway struggles to provide. More schools willing to take on interns, and willing to fund their basic needs while they complete their studies, would mean more of this kind of hands-on, mentored training, and a more direct route from classroom exposure to classroom-ready teachers.

Investing earlier than high school

Given that only 58% of a Grade 1 group reaches a matric pass twelve years later, and that first-year education students themselves often test poorly on basic maths, some researchers argue the highest-leverage fix isnât at matric level at all, itâs foundation- and intermediate-phase numeracy, where a weak early start compounds into avoidance and poor performance by the time learners reach the subject choices that matter for university access. This is exactly the gap that other NPOs and NPCs in this space are built around: getting in early, before learners have already written maths off.

The bottom line

The 2025 matric results tell two true stories at once: South Africaâs schooling system is, on the whole, getting better, more learners reaching Grade 12, more passing, more qualifying for university. But mathematics is moving against that trend, and itâs not really about learner ability or effort. Itâs a supply and distribution problem: too few qualified maths teachers being trained, too many leaving, too many sitting unplaced while posts stay vacant, and a bias against the poorest schools. Fixing the pass rate starts with fixing that pipeline end to end, not the exam. DM

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.