Review for teachers overdue

THE assurance by Education Minister Nick Kuman this week that teachers’ salaries and conditions would be reviewed is welcome news.
In fact, an upward review of salaries for teachers across the board has been overdue for a long while already.  Salary adjustments granted teachers over the years were at best inconsistent with the trend of rapidly rising cost of living and services. That is true for most other public servants including health workers.
As teachers battled on over the years under conditions most are well aware of, the O’Neill government’s tuition fee-free education policy has made worse what has been a critical situation – the high teacher-to-student ratio in most public schools.
Over the past few years the policy has been in force, a lot more parents were able to enrol their children in schools which naturally resulted in overcrowded classrooms.  And overcrowded classrooms meant a lot more work for teachers.
Critics of the Government’s TFF education policy have pointed out that enrolling large numbers of students in school could easily compromise the quality of education in these schools. The large numbers in classrooms permit very little time for teachers to interact with individual students thus the “average” ones are denied the extra assistance they deserve.
The situation also results in a lot of stress to teachers because of the number of children involved and the amount of work in preparing and correcting classroom work and counselling.
The minister has conceded that teachers and health workers have been taken for granted.  It must be noted that in most rural areas, teachers and health workers are the most important public servants and the face of government there.
The move to re-negotiate teachers’ salaries with input from the Teaching Services Commission, the Education Department and the PNG Teachers Association should be an obvious second step to the Government’s free education policy.
Having achieved its primary goal of getting more school-aged children into classrooms, the next thing it should do is to ensure that the men and women mentoring those children are happy with what they are paid.
We are a long way from countries like Switzerland whose teachers are paid the highest annual salaries among teachers in member countries of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, according to a study by The Guardian newspaper.
That same study also showed that teachers in China, Greece, Turkey and South Korea were held in enjoyed the greatest respect among the public and students among the OECD countries.
Those countries view teaching as a very important profession.
For the past 40 years, PNG’s development has been centred around and driven by the resource sector.  However, the global trend now is investment in technology and human capacity building.
It means that the country will have to shift to quality education for its citizens.  The current government’s education policy is headed in that direction, however, its next big investment should be in teacher education to bring out quality teaching for quality outcomes.
More investment is required in teachers colleges. While student enrolments throughout the country have been a positive outcome of the TFF policy, teacher education should also be allocated some of that government funding.
Both government and private run training colleges throughout the country should be given prominence by any future government so teachers we graduate are competent and knowledgeable to impart knowledge in today’s modern world.
What we have been paying our teachers is perhaps a reflection of how we view teaching as a profession in this country.
For many years teachers colleges have picked their quota from secondary schools among mostly “C” students while the cream of the crop opted for university or other colleges to train for more “glamorous” professions.
Teaching should now be made an attractive option for the brightest young people coming out of secondary schools so they can shape the next generation of smart students.
The inevitable shift from an economy based on the agriculture and mineral resource sector to one based on innovation and technology can only be driven by a well-educated and adequately skilled population.
Such a shift beings with competent and contented teachers and the proposed review of teachers’ salaries and conditions is therefore timely and requires all concerned parties to make it happen.