• By Dr Marelize Vergottini, senior lecturer in Social Work at the North-West University (NWU).
South Africa is not simply facing a teacher shortage. It is witnessing the erosion of the entire system of care that should surround a school, and teachers are being crushed beneath the weight of everything falling through the gaps. We are losing teachers, the social workers who support them and the non-governmental organisations to which they refer vulnerable children. These are not three separate crises. They are one crisis — and it is unfolding now.
Much of the recent public debate has focused on whether South Africa can replace retiring teachers quickly enough. Almost half of the country’s public-school educators are already aged 50 or older, while more than 17 000 teaching posts were vacant in January 2026.
However, the pressure driving teachers from the profession extends far beyond the classroom. At the same time that teachers are being expected to do more, the services on which they rely to assist children in crisis are being weakened or defunded.
Why teachers really leave
A recent survey involving 1 513 teachers across all nine provinces found that 49% wanted to leave the profession within the next decade. This figure increased to 57% among teachers working in no-fee schools.
Only 2% said they no longer enjoyed working with children. The real reasons were overwork, inadequate remuneration and an overwhelming administrative burden. Seventy per cent identified administration as their greatest source of stress, while a third said the profession was damaging their mental health.
The experiences behind these figures reveal the true extent of the pressure. Teachers regularly deal with disclosures of abuse, parental alcoholism, gangsterism, drug use and pregnancy — sometimes even in primary schools. They must then attempt, often unsuccessfully, to secure the assistance of a social worker.
This is the hinge on which the crisis turns. Teachers can carry a great deal when there is somewhere to refer a vulnerable child. What ultimately breaks them is being expected to serve as both the first responder and the last resort.
One professional for every 17 000 children
The state’s psychosocial support network within public schools is extraordinarily thin. The entire public education sector employs only 761 social services professionals, including 232 educational psychologists, to serve approximately 12.8 million learners.
That equates to roughly one psychosocial professional for every 17 000 children. This cannot be regarded as an adequate service. It is the clearest possible indication that South Africa can no longer afford to operate without proper school social-work services.
For decades, much of this gap has been filled by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector. Child Welfare branches, the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (SANCA), the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders (NICRO), shelters and trauma centres provide the services to which teachers turn when children need specialised assistance.
These are precisely the services that are now collapsing.
The Department cannot do this alone
The Department of Social Development is the legitimate, constitutionally mandated custodian of social welfare. It carries an enormous responsibility, often with limited resources. Nobody is suggesting that the Department should be replaced or that its role should diminish.
However, it has never delivered these services alone, nor can it reasonably be expected to do so.
South Africa operates a mixed-welfare model in which the state funds NGOs to perform much of the frontline work. When an NGO welfare office closes and its case files are transferred to the Department “to ensure continuity of services”, that continuity depends on an institution that is already stretched beyond capacity.
NGOs are not competitors to government. They are a vital part of the country’s welfare-delivery system. Their networks of trust, specialist knowledge and local reach have been built over decades and cannot simply be recreated overnight.
The safety net is being cut
The 2010 NAWONGO judgment clarified the state’s funding obligations and established deadlines for concluding contracts and making payments. Yet these deadlines are now routinely missed.
In Gauteng, the Gauteng Care Crisis Committee, representing more than 500 organisations, reported that three months into the 2026/27 financial year, many NGOs still had neither signed contracts nor received payments. It marked the sector’s fourth protest in four years.
Lifeline Vaal, which has served the Vaal Triangle for 44 years, was unable to pay its staff from April. On 31 July 2026, NG Welfare Vanderbijlpark, a registered child-protection organisation, permanently ceased operations and transferred its active cases to the Department of Social Development.
The crisis is national. KwaZulu-Natal reduced NGO funding from R755 million to R695 million in a single year, while many child subsidies have remained unchanged since 2019. In the Western Cape, the Child Protection Alliance, representing more than 70% of the province’s NGO child-protection workers, has warned that five years of frozen subsidies amount to a real-terms reduction of between 20% and 25%.
Several offices have already closed, and more are expected to follow. Government officials responsible for administering subsidies receive their salaries on time, while NGOs performing essential frontline work are left struggling for survival.
The children who lose the most
Consider the challenge of substance abuse. Schools rely on organisations such as SANCA to provide outpatient treatment that allows children to remain with their families and continue attending school. This support is possible only when those services remain operational.
Demand is increasing sharply. By the end of 2025, children younger than 13 accounted for 10% of clients at SANCA’s Central Rand centre, up from 2%, while 44% of all clients were younger than 18.
When treatment is unavailable, schools are left with limited options, including suspension and exclusion. These responses can push already vulnerable children further away from the education system.
This is the connection that policymakers continue to overlook. Child protection functions as a network: a teacher identifies the warning signs, a school social worker coordinates the response and an NGO provides the specialised service. Remove the NGO from that chain and the entire system begins to fail.
Every welfare office that closes transfers more responsibility to the people least equipped and resourced to carry it: teachers. The teacher-retention crisis and the NGO-funding crisis are therefore the same crisis viewed from opposite ends.
Above all, children must remain in school. For many vulnerable children, school is the only safe and predictable structure in their lives. It is where they are fed, seen and connected to assistance.
Children who leave school because of pregnancy, substance abuse or untreated trauma do not disappear from the country’s social ledger. They are likely to reappear later — and at far greater cost — in clinics, courtrooms and unemployment statistics.
Eighty-one per cent of South Africa’s Grade 4 learners already cannot read for meaning, while six in every 10 children experience trauma during childhood. These children cannot afford to lose the final door through which help might still reach them.
What must happen now
NGOs must be paid fully and on time, as the law already requires. The NAWONGO judgment is more than 15 years old. The continued failure to meet its deadlines represents an administrative and political failure and may constitute unlawful conduct. The South African Human Rights Commission should investigate the chronic delays.
The referral network must be recognised and funded as essential social infrastructure, not treated as charity. A SANCA or Child Welfare office is a load-bearing part of the country’s protection system. It should be ring-fenced and funded with the same seriousness as a clinic, in partnership with the Department rather than in place of it.
South Africa must also work towards placing a school social worker in every school and finalise the regulations governing school social work. Draft regulations recognising school social work were released in 2020 but remain unfinalised six years later. Finalising them is an urgent administrative step towards strengthening the entire support chain and providing direct relief to teachers.
We continue to debate these problems in separate rooms, but children do not experience their lives in separate rooms. A hungry morning, untreated trauma, an unavailable drug counsellor, an exhausted teacher and a closed welfare office all place their weight on the same small shoulders.
The doors are closing one by one. We can still keep them open — but only if we stop pretending that these are separate emergencies.
