The Department of Basic Education (DBE) has shared that it has managed to award teaching bursaries to a total of 183,609 teaching students.
The department started with just 3662 teaching students in 2007, and had its highest number of recruits in 2017 for the Funza Lushaka Bursary programme.
As part of its selection criteria, the bursary funds young South Africans who demonstrate good academic ability and an interest in studying towards a teaching profession.
The applicant must first be accepted into an approved Bachelor in Education degree or Postgraduate Certificate in Education programme, specialising in two or more of the priority subject areas.
In a meeting, the Education Department has clarified:
Students ought to be committed and show enthusiasm for a professional career in teaching.
Recipients of these bursaries will be required to teach at a public school for the same number of years that they received the bursary.
The department has emphasised that the students are given six month to be placed in public schools after graduations. It is said that an estimated 33,113 bursary recipients were placed after their graduation during an eight-year period from 2013.
Successful teaching graduates under the Funza Lushaka bursary will not be required to provide any form of repayment for the bursary unless they do not adhere to the bursary conditions.
In that case, they may be required to make repayments for the teaching bursary. The amount that is repayable is the full amount of the bursary received under the programme, less one year's funding for every year spent teaching at a public school.
The Education department had announced that the teaching funding applications for 2023 opened on 17 October 2022 and will close on 16 January 2023 for new applicants of the teaching bursary.
