Teachers are leaving the profession in their thousands, a rate that has left government officials disturbed and prompted educators' unions to warn of serious consequences.
School violence, low salaries, strenuous working conditions and a profession that has lost its spark are driving teachers out of classrooms every year.
The figures comprising resignations, deaths, dismissals and early retirement due to ill health were revealed by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga in a reply to a parliamentary question.
She said 24 750 teachers left the profession between 2005 and 2008.
Basic Education director-general Bobby Soobrayan was concerned more teachers were quitting the profession than the numbers being trained.
The department said it needed 20 000 new teachers every year, but only about 8 000 were qualifying.
"The international average attrition rate is 5 percent a year. Our figure is between 3 and 5 percent, and since 2005 we still have 365 000 teachers. There is no reason to panic," said Soobrayan.
He noted that the department was conducting a study to "look carefully" into the issue.
"We are monitoring the average attrition rate because if it is too high, it means we will have a shortage of teachers. The impact right now is that there's a slight imbalance in the number of teachers we have.
"The slight problem is that we have more people leaving than those being trained."
The department was working closely with higher education institutions to find innovative ways to attract young people to the profession.
Soobrayan said there was a need to introduce better salaries and retention programmes to keep teachers in classrooms.
Recruiting retired teachers was a challenge because those who had retired "may be very old and not able to keep up with the pace of the new curriculum".
The statistics showed that more than 4 500 teachers had resigned in the 2007-2008 financial year alone, up from about 4 300 in 2006-20076 and 3 800 in 2005-06. An average of 2 000 teachers went into retirement each year, while about 1 800 died and more than 500 quit due to ill health.
The statistics showed that the largest number of teachers quitting were in Gauteng, with 5 614 leaving between 2005 and 2008, followed by KwaZulu-Natal (5 005), the Eastern Cape (4 763), Western Cape (3 017), Limpopo (2 317), Free State (1 979), Mpumalanga (1 686), North West (1 658) and Northern Cape (611).
Motshekga has indicated that a programme has been developed to ensure that vacancies are filled "speedily".