A few weeks ago the Kaieteur News published an article based on an interview with Ms. Leila Ramson, Chairperson of the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) in which she reportedly alluded to a soon-to-be-put-in-place “policy” that would require teachers who have not been trained at the Cyril Potter College of Education to seek to do so.
The requirement would appear to target teachers in the system who lack the eligibility qualification for entry into CPCE, particularly their non-possession of passes in CXC English and Mathematics.
This is not the first time that the state-run education system has made public its wish that teachers who are not professionally trained ‘put themselves in order’ so to speak and there is of course nothing wrong with a policy that seeks to maximize the number of trained teachers in the system. In an ideal world every child in every classroom should benefit from tuition under a trained teacher and, where necessary, trained specialist teachers; except of course that our world is a far from ideal one insofar as we have never – for several reasons – been able to realize a full complement of trained teachers to meet classroom requirements.
Historically, untrained teachers – persons in the system who are equipped with some presumably suitable qualification but who have never attended a formal teacher training institution – have been recruited to fill the gaps created by the inability of the system to train sufficient teachers to meet classroom demands at a particular point in time. For many of these unqualified teachers teaching is sort of ‘stop gap’ job. Indeed, some of those positions are filled by for a number of post-secondary youngsters some of whom may indeed possess passes in English and Mathematics at CXC but who have no desire to remain in the profession and therefore have no interest in entering the CPCE.
Untrained teachers also frequently show up in certain subject areas – including foreign languages, the sciences and technical subjects – in which they may be specifically qualified without ever having undergone formal teacher training. Again, many of these persons may never have set out to be teachers in the first place. Circum-stances may have compelled them to accept temporary or even longer term positions in the teaching system and, of course, given the dire scarcity of professionally trained teachers who are substantively qualified in those specialist subject areas (foreign languages, technical subjects and the natural sciences are good examples) the state system would have been only too happy to recruit them in the first place. Here it should be added that at the CXC level, a scarcity of teachers in some subjects has resulted in clusters of extra lessons classes that allow students wishing to sit some of the aforementioned subjects to have access to the limited numbers of teachers qualified to teach them.
The issue of the compulsoriness of CXC passes at English and Mathematics as criteria for acceptance at the CPCE has been a sore point for many years though it is a far less complicated issue than it is made out to be. The fact is that the teaching profession has been unable to compete with other options (like better-paying jobs or entry into University to pursue studies in more lucrative disciplines) which become open to persons who are successful at English and Mathematics (among other subjects) at the CXC examination. Over the years the teaching profession has had to take what it can afford and until it can afford better it will, it seems, have to settle for what is available to it.
Setting aside the paltriness of teachers’ pay teaching in the state school system has long lost its ‘shine.’ These days, teachers serving at state schools must, in many instances, endure the unwholesomeness of run-down schoolhouses with their sub-standard sanitary blocks, piles of broken furniture, shortage of teaching tools to say nothing about overcrowded classrooms and seemingly in a growing number of cases, out-of-control children. In effect, and however unpalatable the powers that be may find it, teaching in the state school system has become increasingly unappealing, a truism that manifests itself in the numbers of CPCE-trained teachers who give up years of service in the state school system to take up jobs at private schools.
If the proliferation of ‘extra lessons’ which, these days, is widespread and caters for almost every level in the school system, provides a ‘second income’ for a growing number of teachers, the phenomenon also raises poignant questions about education delivery at the day to day classroom level.
While there are still plenty of committed professionals in the teaching sector and perhaps more than a few bright youngsters who may fancy the classroom as a vocation, on the whole, the nation’s best and brightest are not clamouring for admission to the Cyril Potter College of Education immediately having received their CXC results that include good grades in English and Mathematics. They are looking elsewhere.
If, therefore, there is nothing wrong with seeking to raise the bar as far as maximizing the numbers of trained teachers in the state school system is concerned, that ambition must be tempered with realism. Creating a larger corps of professionally trained teachers is not an objective that will he achieved simply by a “policy” that requires untrained teachers to get themselves ‘in order.’ The state education system must also examine its chronic weaknesses and get its own house ‘in order.’
