It’s a new week. I receive a referral for an in-hospital patient.
Another teacher.
Probably teacher number 40 in the last 20 months that I’ve worked in this environment.
“My work is the reason I’m here,” she says.
“The classroom is overcrowded.
“The children don’t listen.
“There’s no discipline, no leadership, no support.
“The principal says discipline is our responsibility.
“The HOD (head of department) says their hands are tied.
“What must they do?
“They’re struggling too.”
The curriculum is overloaded, the workload unmanageable, the system collapsing.
She teaches at a quintile 3 school, no fees, limited resources, and a feeding scheme where children arrive hungry, tired, and burdened by their own psychosocial issues.
Depressed. Anxious. Burned out. A high-stress environment with no relief in sight.
I get a déjà vu feeling.
Different teacher, same story.
The revolving door of burnout.
The psychiatrist will diagnose a high-stress work environment impairing functioning, leading to a depressive episode, anxiety, burnout.
The occupational therapist will do a functional capacity evaluation confirming depression, anxiety and burnout.
The recommendation — temporary incapacity leave and, ideally, a transfer.
But it’s never that simple.
Transfers can’t happen, posts are frozen.
The onus is on the teacher to find someone willing to “swap”.
The union says: “Our hands are tied. We’re in meetings about it.”
Emails go unanswered.
Requests vanish into bureaucratic silence.
And so, another term passes.
The teacher is at home, booked off, recovering.
But the class goes untaught for three months.
When she returns, the anxiety floods back.
The workload has doubled.
Nothing has changed.
The system that broke her, welcomes her back unchanged.
Six months later, she’s back in hospital.
And the children?
They’ve lost another year of consistent teaching.
In the last few months, headlines in the Herald have shocked the public.
• A principal assaulting a pupil.
• Another throwing boiling water at children making a noise outside his office.
No-one can condone such acts.
But we must ask, why are these the extremes?
Are we seeing the long-term effects of unresolved trauma among a generation of educators and leaders, shaped by apartheid, who were never offered psychological support?
Are we witnessing leadership fatigue, compassion collapse or survival mode, where burnout and bureaucracy have replaced humanity and accountability?
Despite the Eastern Cape’s formal policy on incapacity leave and ill-health retirement (PILIR) and its inclusion in the 2023/2024 annual report, there are no public statistics on how many teachers in the province are on temporary incapacity leave or how many classrooms stand empty as a result.
The Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC) confirms that PILIR reports are tabled annually, yet none are publicly available in detail.
In a court affidavit several years ago, a figure of 9,000 incapacity and ill-health retirement cases in the Eastern Cape was cited unverified, but indicative of the scale of collapse.
Nationally, the Public Service Commission reports an average of 44 days per year of temporary incapacity leave across the public service.
And yet, the Eastern Cape, one of the most under-resourced provinces, likely exceeds that; we just don’t know by how much.
The silence in the data mirrors the silence in the system.
Meanwhile, research on Eastern Cape teachers shows that:
• Ill-disciplined pupils, lack of leadership support and overcrowding are the top sources of stress;
• Nearly 50% of teachers nationally report wanting to leave the profession due to burnout;
• In many Eastern Cape secondary schools, teacher absence rates exceed 5%, reflecting the system-wide strain.
We talk about teacher burnout as if it’s an occupational hazard. It isn’t.
It’s a child protection issue.
When teachers are overburdened, unsupported and emotionally exhausted, the classroom becomes an unsafe space.
Children lose consistent education, emotional containment and modelling of regulation, all vital for healthy development.
A traumatised teacher cannot be expected to hold a traumatised child.
This is where mental health meets policy failure. When adults break, children pay the price.
Protecting our children starts with protecting our teachers.
That means:
• Prioritising mental health resources for teachers, not as a luxury, but as a safeguard for children’s wellbeing;
• Holding departments accountable for responding to incapacity leave requests, transfers and accommodation recommendations;
• Building functional partnerships between education, health and social development because burnout, absenteeism and classroom violence are public health issues, not isolated disciplinary ones.
We can’t keep patching burned-out teachers and sending them back into the same fire.
Each untreated breakdown fuels another gap in a child’s learning, another unsafe classroom, another news headline.
The system may have collapsed quietly, but its consequences are loud, echoing in classrooms, clinics and children’s lives.
Until we care for those who teach, our schools will remain both a symptom and a source of SA’s mental health crisis.
Kelsey Geswint is a psychiatric social worker in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape. She works with adolescents and adults in mental health care and advocates for systemic reform in education and child protection
The Herald
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