Johannesburg — SA NEEDED a "strengthened, integrated" plan for teacher development, the Education Labour Relations Council summit on teacher development resolved last week.

This means drafters will be heading back to the drawing board to take another look at the Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS), a mechanism for measuring teacher performance.

This revision would come just two years after the much haggled over National Policy Framework for Teacher Education and Development was gazetted in 2007.

The conference declaration specifically calls for teacher development for state- employed teachers to be "properly funded as a national competence".

In addition to setting the requirements for education programmes for those who wish to become teachers, the policy framework does so for programmes meant to improve qualified teachers' skills, participation in which is an IQMS requirement.

The IQMS has not been widely implemented, often due to a lack of capacity in the provincial education departments.

The conference declaration calls for the IQMS to be "streamlined and rebranded".

"Mechanisms for identifying and responding to teacher development needs will be improved, particularly in relation to developing curriculum competence that will enhance the quality of teaching and learning in our schools.

"This should be done in a way that secures the trust and confidence of teachers, so that they are able to discuss their own challenges in a non-punitive environment and are able to access relevant mentoring, support and training that is targeted to their needs," the declaration reads.

The IQMS was for years an enormous bone of contention in negotiations between the government and teacher unions, with unions complaining that the system would test teachers without taking into account the vastly different conditions under which different teachers work.

Also, the system was at least in part linked to salary progression, and unions wanted guarantees teachers would get the support the IQMS showed they needed.

Attending the conference were a range of interested parties, including teacher unions, the two education departments, the South African Council for Educators, the Education, Development and Training Practices sectoral education and training authority and Higher Education SA.

The new plan would set clear priorities and realistic time frames for implementation, present clearly the roles and responsibilities of the different constituencies and relate key decisions to the broader context of teacher supply and demand , according to the conference declaration.

The guest speaker, Prof Dennis Shirley, who lectures in education at the US's Boston College, a private research university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, said he had been impressed with the breadth of collaboration evident at the three-day conference.

"It's hard to get different sectors to agree on educational change. That's an international problem ... You (SA) are probably behind the US, the UK and Canada, but ahead of Germany, Switzerland and Austria in the collaborative process," he said.