Recently, tucked away in the Stabroek News editorial ‘Lacklustre performance by Opposition in Parliament’ (22/10/2012) is the suggestion that, rather than doing very little over the last session, the opposition could have established parliamentary committees to consider, inter alia, how to retain trained teachers. In my view this suggestion is useful for two additional reasons.
Firstly, parliament should provide policy outlooks for debate before it rushes to legislation on important national issues. Indeed, in the normal parliamentary setting the regime should provide policy (green/white) papers, and now that the opposition is seeking to initiate legislation it should also publish policy documents before moving to legislation, and I suspect that the motions the opposition has recently been passing are partly intended to full this gap. Further, in the event that the regime carries out its threats not to cooperate on and/or assent to any resulting legislation, such policy papers could also be an extremely useful aspect of the opposition information/propaganda efforts.
Secondly, education is one of those all-encompassing social issues around which the present quite fractious parliament may be able to build consensus, cause sensible improvement to result and perhaps even help to build the type of environment that could contribute to the much needed cooperation.
At one time the issue of teacher migration was a hot national, regional and international topic but perhaps due to the efforts made to improve teachers’ pay and conditions of service, the actions taken at regional and international levels, such as the Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol (to which we will pay some more attention later), to ease the burden of recruitment from poor countries and the changing needs of recruiting countries, the problem of teacher retention may now not be as important as it once was.
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that given our low remuneration and opportunistic historical and geographical location, professional, including teacher, migration will remain a problem for some considerable time. We know that in Guyana some 86% of university graduates migrate and this at least suggests that better qualified teachers are indeed still leaving in significant numbers and that retention efforts are therefore still required.
However, talk about teacher retention in this kind of a low wage context requires a total reconceptualisation of the problem and in 2004 the Ministry of Education began to devise an approach, which I will reproduce almost verbatim in my next articles in the hope that it can contribute to any ensuing discourse on this matter. But first I need to recognise that this approach was rooted in a regional and international discourse that was at the time taking place to ease the situation for the relevant developing countries.
In the earlier part of the present century teacher migration posed a problem for many countries in this region. Thus in July 2002, with the aid of the Commonwealth Secretariat, a meeting of Caribbean Community Ministers of Education was held in Barbados to consider the issue. That meeting adopted the Savannah Accord, which, inter alia, requested the Commonwealth Secretariat to develop an international protocol for the recruitment of teachers. The Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in October 2003 considered a draft Protocol on Teacher Recruitment and established a Working Group on Teacher Recruitment to complete the work by September 2004.
Briefly, the final Protocol for the Recruitment of Commonwealth Teachers sought to balance the right of teachers to migrate on a temporary or permanent basis with the needs of national education systems. It also proclaimed on the rights of the recruited teachers and sought to garner the positive benefits of migration.
While the Protocol recognised that recruiting teachers from poor countries can be detrimental to the education system of those countries, it upheld the right of countries to recruit teachers from where they may be found but called upon the education authorities of the recruiting countries to manage their arrangements to limit the need to recruit foreign teachers.
“It is the responsibility of source countries,” it claims, “to manage teacher supply and demand within the country … The country should have effective strategies to improve the attractiveness of teaching as a profession, and to ensure the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers in areas of strategic importance.”
The Protocol observed that while recruited teachers are bound by national laws and regulations of the recruiting country they should not receive conditions and opportunities for development lesser than those of nationals and that newly recruited teachers should be provided with adequate orientation programmes to allow them to easily adjust to their new conditions.
It also stated that: “Recruiting and source countries should agree on mutually acceptable measures to mitigate any harmful impact of such recruitment. Where requested by source countries, recruiting and source countries shall enter into bi-lateral discussions and make every effort to reach an agreement which will provide for such measures.
Consideration will be given to forms of assistance such as technical support for institutional strengthening, specific programmes for recruited teachers, and capacity building to increase the output of trained teachers in source countries.”
It insisted that recruitment should not be done during the academic year and that the recruiting country should provide the source country with all relevant information about the teachers they have recruited and that where such information is not available it should be developed.
Where source countries require it, recruiting countries should make every effort to obtain clearance certificates, which the source country should not unreasonably withhold. The recruiting countries should establish proper complaint mechanisms and these should be made known to recruited teachers.
According to the Protocol, a country has the right to be informed of any organised recruitment of its teachers by or on behalf of other countries and there will be circumstances in which a country may not be able to support the release of its teachers.
However, if a country refuses any organised recruitment, the recruiting country should be informed and bilateral discussions should be held in an effort to reach a mutual agreement.
The Protocol was not a legal document but sought to create something of a moral framework for governments, international organisations, etc to devise and implement programmes and regulations to deal with the issue of teacher migration. It is within this context that the approach I will present in the next two weeks was devised.
