Dear Editor,
You cannot improve children’s education by just saying what you will do, including providing school transport, even as President. First of all there has to be a Minister of Education who may have differing views about priorities.
In the meantime, however, whoever runs with the ball must understand the urgent need to consult with the Guyana Teachers’ Union, even though the latter has been stuck in the outdated mode of teacher development as enunciated by a myopic Teaching Services Commission. The hard fact is that children cannot be better educated without the attentiveness of better teachers.
In this connection an attempt has recently been made to upgrade certification to the level of an Associate Degree at UG. Yet the aforementioned myopia does not contain what should have been an educated plan to fit the associate graduate’s pay into the current teacher pay structure, old-fashioned as it is, of an interminable 21 grades (of which three at least are fixed salaries, at the lowest and the highest grades respectively), with notoriously cramped bandwidths conceived possibly half a century ago, and in stark contrast to (the 14) bandwidths in the public service and other statutory bodies.
The Minister of Education to-be must be aware of too many of the restrictive, if not primitive, conditions of service, particularly obtaining in the hinterland areas, that make it prohibitive for some aspirants to apply. Not that structural accommodation and facilities in remote areas, and areas not so remote, are the most attractive. So that transport for children will have to be matched by at least transportation for certain categories of teachers.
The various details in relation to these appointments can be read in the published advertisements of three to four hundred vacancies annually, and despite the obvious poor returns in successful applicants, the unimaginative approach to recruitment and promotion is determinedly repeated. Some, including teachers themselves, must wonder why a UG graduate does not qualify to be, for example, a graduate master vis-à-vis the graduate from the Cyril Potter College of Education.
Others must be particularly puzzled, and indeed frustrated, at being appointed to a ‘Temporary’ status – a substantive position in the hierarchical structure. It is perhaps the only circumstance in Guyana and elsewhere, where ‘temporariness’ counts for service towards a pension, based on approved salary scales. That teachers accept this fundamental contradiction of reason is a reflection of their own constricted view of life in the teaching service.Others see the need for a comprehensive overhaul of the Teaching Service Commission as a decision-making body; a complete revision of the attendant rules, regulations and procedures.
Informed analysts would argue the case for a thorough restructuring of the teaching organisational hierarchy based on a wide-ranging evaluative exercise regarding the various categories of teaching and school management jobs in which all the relevant parties will be involved.
Such an undertaking cannot be deferred for even a presidential hopeful. It requires a task force of eminently relevant competencies and skills that must take into account the overlooked fault lines in the private school sector.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
