Ask any experienced teacher in a South African public school how they spend their time, and the answer will surprise you. Not because of what it contains — lesson preparation, marking, learner support — but because of what sits alongside those things: attendance registers, LURITS submissions, portfolio evidence files, moderation checklists, curriculum coverage reports, parental consent forms, departmental returns, and an unending inbox of circulars from the district office.
The OECD's TALIS 2024 survey found that approximately half of teachers globally report excessive administrative work as a significant source of work-related stress — particularly those with more than ten years of experience. South Africa's teaching workforce faces this burden on top of structural conditions that amplify its impact: some of the largest class sizes in the world, 31,462 vacant teacher posts as of April 2024, and a system where the same teacher teaching 55 learners is also responsible for generating the paperwork those 55 learners require.
The compound effect: vacancy plus overload
South Africa's teacher vacancy crisis and its administrative burden are separate problems, but they compound each other in ways that are difficult to untangle. When a school has 8 teachers instead of 11, the remaining 8 do not simply share the teaching load — they share everything. Cover periods, duty rosters, moderation responsibilities, and administrative obligations all concentrate on a smaller group.
The Public Servants' Association has flagged that classroom overcrowding and increased workloads are contributing to rising absenteeism among teachers. Over 32,000 teachers left the profession between 2020 and 2025 — through resignation, retirement, and dismissal. The Department of Basic Education's own National Recruitment Database lists at least 12,700 qualified unemployed educators who are ready for deployment but have not been placed. The shortage is not principally a supply problem.
"Classrooms are overcrowded, and our teachers are overworked and underpaid. Burnout and deteriorating working conditions are pushing educators out faster than they can be replaced."
What administrative work actually looks like
It is worth being specific about what administrative work means in practice, because the word "admin" can sound abstract. For a teacher managing six classes with an average of 45 learners per class, a single round of assignment setting, collecting, marking, recording, and returning to learners could involve 270 physical or digital interactions. Multiply that across a term, add the departmental reporting obligations, and the weekly time cost runs into hours that could otherwise go to lesson preparation, individual learner support, or simply recovering enough to teach well the next day.
Research consistently shows that teachers with more administrative demands report lower well-being, lower job satisfaction, and reduced effectiveness in the classroom. The TALIS data notes that experienced teachers — those with over ten years in the profession — feel the administrative burden most acutely, precisely because they are often given the most responsibility.
The language burden no one measures
Teacher workload data almost never captures one of the most exhausting and least acknowledged dimensions of teaching in South Africa: the cognitive and pedagogical labour of delivering a curriculum in a language that neither the teacher nor the learners speaks as a mother tongue.
South Africa's Language in Education Policy requires that from Grade 4 onward, schools use English or Afrikaans as the language of learning and teaching. In practice, more than 80% of learners from African language backgrounds are being taught in their second or third language — and in many township schools, by teachers for whom English is also a second or third language. The 2030 Reading Panel noted that primary school teachers in South Africa arrive at university with some of the lowest language skills of any student cohort, and receive inadequate training in how to teach reading across the language divide. These teachers are then placed in classrooms of 50 learners and asked to teach Science, Mathematics, and Life Orientation in English, while switching informally into Zulu or Setswana to ensure understanding — a practice known as code-switching that is technically against policy but is the only way learning can realistically happen.
This is unreported labour. It does not appear in workload surveys. It does not feature in LURITS submissions or curriculum coverage reports. But it is real, constant, and invisible to everyone except the teacher standing in the room — simultaneously translating content, managing classroom behaviour, maintaining discipline in overcrowded conditions, and hoping that the learner at the back who has been quiet since Tuesday is quietly understanding, not quietly giving up.
"The majority of South Africa's teachers work in classrooms where English is the official language of learning and teaching, but English is neither the teacher's nor the learners' main language."
— TIMSS South Africa, on the daily linguistic reality of South African classrooms
Two tiers of the same profession
Not all South African teachers experience overload equally. A teacher at a well-resourced former Model C school in Sandton — with a class of 28 learners, a teaching assistant for administrative support, a dedicated IT technician, and parents who follow up on assignments — inhabits a structurally different profession from a teacher at a Quintile 1 school in Soweto managing 55 learners, no support staff, a failing photocopier, and parents who work rotating shifts and cannot attend evening meetings.
Both teachers are employed by the Department of Basic Education. Both earn on the same salary scales. But the Model C teacher's administrative load is absorbed by infrastructure: a secretary who handles LURITS submissions, a learning management system paid for by the school governing body, a finance officer who manages fee exemptions. In the township school, those functions fall to the classroom teacher — often after school hours, often at home, often on a personal laptop or phone. The 2020 study on Gauteng township and urban schools found that even accessing the basic tools to complete departmental returns was a logistical burden: schools with unstable electricity, outdated hardware, and unreliable internet could not complete digital submissions without first solving a connectivity problem that should not be theirs to solve.
The gender dimension of the teaching workforce compounds this further. South Africa's teaching profession is majority female, particularly at the primary level where literacy foundations are laid. Yet female teachers — especially those in township schools — often carry a double burden: the administrative and pedagogical demands of school, and the caregiving responsibilities at home that South African society disproportionately assigns to women. Stats SA's own 2025 data shows that young women's NEET rate is consistently higher than young men's, and that women without a matric certificate face an unemployment rate of 42.8% — meaning the teachers in front of these classrooms are serving communities where the consequences of educational failure fall most heavily on women, taught by professionals who understand that reality from the inside.
What giving time back actually means
iSkool was built around a simple premise: if a teacher can set a quiz once and have the system mark it, record the scores, flag the learners who failed, and generate the grade report — that is time returned. Not free time. Teaching time. Time for the learner who is struggling with fractions. Time for the lesson plan that was half-finished at 10pm. Time to be a teacher instead of a data-capturer.
The platform's grade tracking, assignment distribution, resource library, and announcement system are not features built because they sounded good in a pitch deck. Each of them was designed in response to a specific conversation with teachers at Landulwazi Comprehensive School, where iSkool is currently piloting. The things that waste a teacher's time are well-known to teachers. The question is whether anyone who builds tools for them actually listens.
South Africa's teaching workforce is under enormous pressure. Some of that pressure is systemic, political, and cannot be addressed by software. But some of it — the preventable, friction-heavy, time-consuming kind — can be reduced. That is what iSkool is for.