Education Minister affirms
By Politicio staff writer
The Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education Dr. David Moinina Sengeh has assured that amid the many challenges the sector still faces, it has endeavored to ensure that quality service delivery is meted out to beneficiaries of the government’s free quality education programme.
Speaking at the weekly press conference at the Ministry of Information and Communication on Thursday 8th April 2021, the minister said: “the question should not be whether there’s quality education or not, but really how much quality changes we’ve made, because unequivocally, there’s quality education.”
He said that the test of the quality offered could be seen in the government’s recruitment of over 5,000 teachers across the country, the reassessment of over 4,000 others and with 10,000 having received training.
He noted that his administration has led the expansion of the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) to all the districts across the country as promised with fully equipped work stations and Deputy Directors assigned.
The minister maintained that the ministry has developed over a dozen teacher policies on recruitment, retention and placement with a 10% allowance given to teachers for transportation in 2019.
“In 2020, we added 30% salary increase for teachers, about 4,000 of them who were on one level grade have been promoted and put on a different pay grade,” he noted adding that teachers make about 40% of the government’s entire wage bill with about 85,000 teachers across the country.
He said they have been able to review the community teacher relations through what he referred to as an “excellent relationship” with the Sierra Leone Teachers Union (SLTU) and the Council of Principals with meetings held quarterly.
He said that they have prioritized technology and data with the provision of electronic tablets to all secondary schools across the country with teachers trained to collect data on the annual schools census in order to have data driven-informed policies.
He stressed that the ministry has undergone restructuring adding that there’s no basic education commitment that was promised in the manifesto that has not been started.
In the area of enrollment, he said: “we added about 10% of the population to the classrooms, 700,000 kids without the system imploding over two years. What this means is that in addition to us approving over 3,400 new schools, we have Le 52 billion that we spend every term on school subsidies. 80% of schools fees for all school children in this country is paid by the government.”
He went on to note that they have also provided learning materials to schools and that there are children with many more passes now in mathematics, physics, science and engineering than at any time in the country’s history and a reduction in malpractices in public exams.
He said added to the government’s priority human capital development, Cabinet has approved a radical inclusion policy aimed at taking education within the reach of everyone.
On her part, the Deputy Minister of Information Mamadi Ngobeh Kamara said that the free quality school education programme launched in 2018 has expanded universal access to public education, increased in the number of approved schools and with trained and qualified teachers .
Copyright © 2021 Politico Online (09/04/21)
