Education system

WITH the declining quality of education in the country, the government must overhaul the current education system, if PNG is to prosper in terms of human resource development and take back PNG.
To do so would mean that the current education secretary needs to be immediately replaced and also abolish the PNG Teaching Service Commission (TSC) for its continuous non-performance for the past decades.
The never-ending salary issues faced by teachers each year has had no ending.
TSC decided to decentralise its powers by establishing regional offices to manage the on-going teacher salary saga in early 2015 but without success.
Today, teacher’s salary issue had gone out of proportion and is far beyond manageable with the increasing number of teachers in hundreds every year.
Consequently, thousands of teachers had fallen victims at the expenses of the TSC’s inability to effectively manage teacher’s salary issues for the last two centuries.
Moreover, these two institutions have never managed the ongoing poor quality of education standards for years.
They had allowed many unregistered and substandard teachers college to emerge in the country for the last 10 years, resulting the poor quality of teachers coming out from these colleges and deliver rubbish in the classroom.
Teachers from the unauthorised colleges have commenced enrolment four to five years ago.
Once the approval to operate as a teachers colleges is given by the Education Department or Higher Education Department, say after seven or eight years, those who had graduated from those colleges after five to six years ago will be recalled by the college to collect their teaching certificates.
However, the legality of such must be clearly explained by the department because this is the same tactic they had done for Chimbu and other teachers colleges some years back.
Moreover, the quality of education in the country’s primary schools had dropped significantly dropped with the poor quality of teachers coming out from these substandard teachers colleges in the country.
The reason why anyone on the street can enter teachers college and graduate is that the teachers college diploma course curriculum or programmes remains the same as those of the 70s.
They are simple basics, almost equivalent to the curriculum materials used by the upper primary (grades 6, 7 and 8) schools.
Few years back, a total of 40 students were identified and removed after they had being enrolled in a registered teachers colleges with fake certificates.
These were people who had never completed any formal secondary education but capitalise on the poor quality of learning and teaching course curriculum, including the very low academic assessment standards, motivating any one on the street to conquer and move on in life.
There is something terribly wrong somewhere and our good education department must step-up to assess and rectify issues affecting the quality of education in the country.
We have a long way to go to develop teacher education policies and programmes on a par with the more developed or developing countries of the world.
Our continued ignorance and incompetence in coordinating quality education standards
and compliance in all our teachers college will result in the downfall of our country’s education system.

Ken Nandawa
Bush Education Advisor