Nine thousand social workers are unemployed, and a million learners are in crisis

South Africa’s public school system is collapsing under the weight of rampant classroom violence, severe teacher shortages, overcrowding and systemic hunger, warns Dr Marelize Vergottini, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at North-West University (NWU).

For millions of children nationwide, schools are no longer safe havens of learning, but spaces defined by trauma and structural failure. Yet, the expansion of psychosocial support in schools is stalled by a shortage of funded provincial posts and budget constraints. This grim reality was confirmed by the Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, in a recent written parliamentary reply.

Gwarube stated that the Department of Basic Education recognised the seriousness of these increasing concerns. She noted that learner wellbeing was central to effective teaching and learning, adding that schools required clear systems to identify learners who needed support and refer them to the appropriate services.

The department’s psychosocial model relied heavily on school-based and district-based support teams to handle early identification and basic support, and learners who required clinical assessment were then referred to the Department of Health.

“The appointment, funding and deployment of school-based or district-based counsellors, psychologists and other psychosocial support personnel are primarily provincial responsibilities, within the available provincial budgets,” Gwarube stated, adding that further expansion was entirely dependent on “broader fiscal constraints”.

The department’s latest data shows a national headcount of only 761 social services professionals currently in the sector. This total includes, among others, 232 educational psychologists and 54 education counsellors. The department added that in many instances, these professionals were district-based and served multiple schools, making a single national learner-to-counsellor ratio impossible to verify.

Administrative stagnation

This reliance on a scattered, district-level framework underscores the urgent need for a standardised approach to school social work. However, the finalisation of regulations to recognise the field as a professional specialisation has been stalled since 2020.

Vergottini explained that draft regulations were released for public comment in 2020, with many stakeholders providing input. While other specialisations had been finalised, school social work had not, and the reason for the delay remained unclear. Daily Maverick sent questions to the department, but by the time of publication no response had been received.

“This prolonged administrative stagnation continues to create deep uncertainty and fragmentation in the sector and directly disadvantages vulnerable learners who rely on psychosocial support in schools,” Vergottini said.

A deeply fractured safety net

School social work is when a qualified social worker, registered with the SA Council for Social Service Professions, is employed within the education system. The education system serves as the host needing to address the needs of learners, teachers and parents.

“The social worker is the link between the school, the parents, the teacher and the learner. Our role is to address barriers to learning, help a child achieve academically, look holistically at the child, and assist wherever possible within those subsystems,” said Vergottini.

She explained that because the field was not yet a recognised professional specialisation, there was no single scope of practice or national regulation governing what a school social worker should actually do. This lack of standardisation left schools navigating blindly, even as the need for psychosocial support on the ground remained vast.

Vergottini added that currently, some provincial education departments only placed social workers in special needs schools, while others had none at all. In some cases, School Governing Bodies (SGBs) utilised their own budgets to hire social workers.

For the majority of public schools that relied on the government, social workers were usually stationed at a district or circuit office. This model could result in a single professional servicing up to 30 different schools, rendering preventive care nearly impossible.

“If a school has 1,000 learners, and you are responsible for 20 such schools, how do you make a real impact? You are just doing crisis intervention the entire time instead of doing what you are truly supposed to do,” said Vergottini.

When properly integrated into a school, a dedicated social worker acted as a crucial safety net, providing the targeted, holistic intervention that educators simply did not have the time or training to offer.

Policies without the professionals

According to the Department of Basic Education’s SIAS (Screening, Identification, Assessment and Support) policy, schools must identify not just academic issues, but behavioural, psychosocial and systemic barriers to learning.

“Often, the school-based support team consists only of teachers. Teachers are there to teach; they aren’t trained to deal with complex psychosocial issues. We are seeing more children diagnosed with conditions like Conduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. These learners need therapeutic input, but if there is no social worker in the school, where do they go? We lack the resources and specialists in low-income areas to even get these children officially diagnosed,” said Vergottini.

She added that a school social worker could support a teacher by observing the classroom, identifying barriers, and collaborating on an individual support plan for a struggling learner.

“We can also sit in on difficult parent interviews and handle the necessary documentation, and we can identify when a teacher is struggling and refer them to a psychologist or the department’s Employee Assistance Programme. It is about multi-professional teamwork,” she said.

Daily Maverick spoke to a Gauteng-based teacher who said she would welcome the idea of having dedicated social workers in schools.

“I know in some schools they have social workers, but they are few and far between. This would be absolutely perfect for our students. I had many kids who came from extreme and absolutely horrific backgrounds, yet there were no social workers available to help. That would really be a great idea to ease up teachers’ burden, and a lot of the issues that our kids face could be resolved,” she said.

School social workers ‘a necessity, not an extra’

According to the South African Council for Social Service Professions, roughly 9,000 qualified social workers are currently unemployed. Vergottini said universities produced capable graduates every year, but because of the fiscal constraints cited by the department, there were simply not enough public sector positions available to them.

She said the challenges in schools reflected a system in crisis, and without dedicated psychosocial support these conditions would continue to hinder learning, entrench inequality and jeopardise children’s futures.

“School social workers are uniquely equipped to address these pervasive challenges. The need is urgent, the evidence is overwhelming, and the consequences of inaction are borne by the country’s most vulnerable population. Every school should have a school social worker as part of its staff – this is a necessity, not an ‘extra’,” said Vergottini. DM