Dear Editor,
Parents are concerned when their children at school face a constant change of teachers owing to them being transferred. It is the children who suffer and it is the new teacher who cannot fit into the class until some time has passed.
It takes time for the teacher to get to know the learning characteristics of the students, and for the students to gauge the manner and style of the teacher and the standards that he/she would demand
Recently there have been transfers of education officers across the eleven education districts.
The rationale for this exercise has not been made clear to the majority of those who are affected. The education officers in the various regions play an integral part in the preparation of the region’s education budget; they know why certain things were budgeted for; the programmes including workshops and seminars that have to be executed, etc, and the priority areas for implementation. Today, with the transfers of officers most of these programmes cannot be effectively implemented much to the detriment of education in the country. Are these officers being shifted in order for them to be exposed to the other regions? This practice
inflects hardship on officers who are placed in regions to which they are strangers and makes them ineffective, while a few officers choose to resign rather than be shifted to an unknown location. Officers are already established in a region, having their own houses, modes of transportation, schooling for children, and a wife/husband who might also be working.
Without being granted additional time to settle in and study the education programme before implementing the same, officers are still unsettled after several months. There will also be additional expense for the region because officers have to travel in and out of region during holiday periods.
It is education delivery as a whole that is affected. This feeling of being unsettled has produced lethargy in many of the education departments across the country. Many of these
departments are overwhelmed with queries from schools for which no sensible answers are forthcoming. It is no surprise that in many instances the telephones are allowed to ring out.
Officers who are new to a region will have a tremendous challenge in learning about the character of a school. Before they find out, it is almost certain that these officers will be made to trot across the regions without staying long enough to make a positive impact.
The pundits in education need to look seriously at the question of the retirement age of teachers, and also to grant promotions only on merit. Many able-bodied educators who retired at fifty-five years of age are still willing to work until the age of sixty with the government if offers are made.
Yours faithfully
(Name and address provided)
