By Mabinty M. Kamara
The Minister of Basic and Secondary Education, Alpha Timbo has announced plans to license teachers as a way of ensuring delivery of quality teaching services.
Mr Timbo said teachers, like lawyers and drivers, will be given license to permit them to teach in the country aside from their various educational certificates. He made the pronouncement at the weekly government press briefing at the Ministry of Information and Communication on Thursday.
“For a teacher to teach in Sierra Leone, by next academic year you must have a teaching license certificate from the Teaching Service Commission,” he said.
This, according to Minister Timbo, is part of the three aspects in the rolling out of the Free Quality Education (FQE), all of which are geared towards ensuring Access, Quality and System Strengthening.
To ensure access, he said, the government succeeded in removing all tuition fees from government and government assisted schools, provides learning materials and pay public examination fees.
As a way of ensuring quality, he added, the method of assessment is also taking seriously, which is why there have been stringent measures in place to tackle examination malpractices. Minister Timbo went on to say that government considered the welfare of teachers seriously and that his ministry was working with the Ministry of Tertiary and Higher Education to bring in loan schemes for those teachers who may want to go for further studies.
Working condition for teachers has for a long time been a persistent subject of discussion, especially after the introduction of the FQE. Teachers say if they are t be expected to deliver quality education, their services should match their remuneration.
In the last 12 months of the launch of the FQE, the government have had to deal with several threats of protests from aggrieved teachers unhappy with the pace of reform regarding their welfare.
Patrick Kanneh, a senior teacher and a holder of the Higher Teachers’ Certificate, told Politico that giving license to teachers is not a bad idea but that it takes more than that to ensure quality in teaching.
“Teachers welfare is what I think should be treated seriously or else all efforts will be fruitless as corruption and leap service will continue even outside the corridors of the school,” he said. Kanneh added that in as much as the government wants to scrutinize the teaching service, it should consider approval and deployment of more teachers as in most schools the untrained teachers are more than the qualified ones.
Apparently the ministry is aware of all these concerns. Timbo assured that in the second phase of the FQE implementation, the government intends to lay more premium on the welfare of teachers. He revealed that they planned to deploy 160 school inspectors across the 16 districts of the country in the quest of ensuring quality service delivery in the teaching service.
“We are doing this to ensure that teachers operate in a professional manner. We want to see how we can address the issue of unqualified teachers as about 65percent of teachers, especially in primary schools, are not qualified. We will also operationalize the teaching service commission to ensure that the teachers’ welfare issue is addressed,” he said.
Minister Timbo also spoke about the just published results of the 2019 National Primary School Examination (NPSE), which has generated a lot of debate due to the huge number of failures recorded. While critics of the government interpret it as an indictment on the FQE, the Minister said the fact that 2018 produced more passes than this year was due to the stringent measures they put in terms of supervising examination.
© 2019 Politico Online
