6.3 Aspirations and Expectations

Despite the gloomy career image that teaching profession holds for students (refer to the general public's negative image of teaching described in the opening pages of this paper), and that the climate of rationalising (cutting down) the teaching force prevails, 54% of the students indicated that they would be teaching within the next 5 years. 61% were confident that this would be the case. This suggests that students are interested in continuing with teaching as a career. Only 1% of the students indicated that they do not want to teach after their completion of their training course. 28% also indicated that they intended to continue studying for higher qualifications.

It is interesting to note that of the 60% of the student population who come from rural areas, only 22% would like to go back to teach in the rural schools. Data from a separate study (Samuel: 1998) indicated divergent reasons for this:

· the perceived lack of support that qualified novice teachers receive from usually lower- or under-qualified resident staff in the rural areas;

· the university trained novice teachers are usually perceived as a threat to the "stablilised culture" of rural schooling;

· the novice university-trained teacher is usually afforded higher status within such rural schools, thus displacing traditional hierarchies of dominantly college-trained graduates;

· the perceived "modern town values" are seen as a threat to "traditional values" which dominate in the rural area; and

· the unwillingness of an urban-based graduate who has imbibed cultural practices of urban living finds it difficult to adjust to rural living again.

Nevertheless 42% of the student teacher respondents indicated that they would be prepared to teach in any school, although preference for urban schools is still evident in the balance of the cohort's responses. See Table 14 below:

Table 14: Preferred School Posting

It is also interesting to note that 13% of the students indicated preference to teach in a private school, as opposed to 10% who indicated their hopes to teach in a government school. This suggests that students believe that it is more likely that they would be employed outside of the government school structure.