Impact of HIV/AIDS on teachers

The high rate of teachers leaving the profession in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province has been accelerated by HIV/AIDS, a study has found. KwaZulu-Natal has one of the largest provincial education systems in the country, with 2.6 million pupils and 76,000 teachers in over 6,000 schools. But the pandemic, at an estimated antenatal HIV prevalence rate of 35 percent, was now threatening to "explode the scale of existing systemic and management problems" in the education department, a study by the Health Economics and AIDS Research Division at the University of Natal has found. The impact of the epidemic included several additional dimensions. Firstly, the rate of directly AIDS-related teacher deaths was still likely to grow before reaching a plateau and declining. Secondly, as AIDS eroded the workforce outside education, teachers were likely to be recruited into the private sector, further increasing the levels of loss. As a third contributing factor, the report found that AIDS deaths usually occurred after a long period of illness, accompanied by depression and trauma, usually while educators were still in service. The cumulative loss of teaching time, quality, continuity and experience also had important implications for teaching and learning that would be harder to monitor and measure, the report added. Up to 11 percent of the 6,000 schools participating in a bi-annual government survey responded to a recently-introduced question on teacher mortality. This showed 654 deaths, of which 580 - or about one percent - were due to illness, based on the reported total of 67,958 publicly paid educators in service in 2000. The rise in deaths caused by illness in the 30-49 age group should be of particular concern to the education sector, and could be associated with AIDS-related opportunistic infections, the study suggested. "Simple arithmetic tells us that we cannot produce sufficient new educators, in time, to replace those likely to be lost to the system, if we continue to train students for a full four years." Providing teachers with antiretroviral drugs to prolong their careers was an issue which would "sooner or later have to be discussed." Nevertheless, whatever decisions the provincial education department made, it had now become clear that it was "no longer business as usual" for the process of teaching and learning. The study findings were not meant to describe a "doomsday scenario", but rather signalled that AIDS-related deaths were eroding the capacity of the education system and would have dramatic consequences for the training and recruitment of teachers, the report warned. For more details: www.und.ac.za