By Saio Marrah
The Minister of Basic and Senior School Education, Dr. Moinina Sengeh, has blamed the poor performance of students in schools on the attitude of some teachers whom he said abandon their posts after receiving government pin codes to work for other institutions.
The Minister made this statement on Tuesday 8 December in parliament when he was summoned by the House where lawmakers expressed concerns over the poor performance of students in this year’s West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).
According to statistics on the examination, only 4.5 percent of those who took the examination across the country got university requirements, with some districts performing so poorly that not a single candidate got the university entry requirement.
In his presentation to the House, the Minister defended the government’s free quality education which he said was beneficial and had been embraced by all Sierra Leoneans.
However, he noted the attitude of some teachers as a challenge to the education sector. He said many teachers moved from urban to rural areas in search of government pin codes, but that they would switch to schools in the urban areas on getting that pin code. He said some even go to private schools while receiving government salary.
“A school owner came to me and said there was a teacher in a village with a pin code and he wanted to come to the city. ‘Please help to switch him to my school when he comes to the city’,” the minister told the House.
Dr Sengeh also blamed the problem on proprietors and heads of schools both in the rural and urban areas, noting that they were the people conniving with teachers to enable them switch to urban schools while leaving the schools in the remote villages without teachers.
According to the minister, the situation has led to the shortage of teachers in rural schools, noting that even though data at the education ministry show that most of these rural schools have teachers, when one goes to these schools, they hardly see teachers there.
The minister said this same situation was the reason why even though they had recruited up to 1,000 new teachers and nearly all of them given pin codes, there was still the issue of insufficient teachers in the rural areas.
He added that another challenge in the educational sector was that the school buses were unable to go to most of the schools in the rural areas in the provinces, simply because there are no good roads leading to them.
The Member of Parliament for Constituency 061, Titus Abdul Kamara, suggested that the Minister put mechanism in place in order to stop teachers from moving to urban cities. But Sengeh disclosed that there were mechanisms already in place, noting that 158 school inspectors had been recruited to help improve the effectiveness of teaching in schools.
The Speaker of Parliament, Dr. Abass Bundu, and the Leader for the Coalition for Change (C4C) party in parliament, Saa Emerson Lamina, all pointed out that there were school proprietors in their constituencies whose schools had few or no teachers with pin code and that they (the MPs) pay their teachers from their monthly salaries.
Paramount Chief Member of Parliament from Tonkolili District, Bai Kurr Kanagboro Sanko III, recommended for a teacher-training programme to be included in university programmes across the country so that teachers would have prestige in their profession.
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