Reward performing teachers

A REWARD for the best performing teachers sounds like a good incentive for improving performance and achieving excellence in both teachers and students.
It is a small step but it can produce good results.
Improving the capacity and general welfare of teachers is a huge development challenge but little interventions like this can make a difference.
Such a reward, as announced recently by Education Minister Jimmy Uguro, would hopefully boost teacher performance in the public education system.
Obviously, a lot more is needed to make teaching a lot more attractive for those already in the service and students who are considering careers in education.
The Education Ministry views teacher as critical to ensuring that teachers remain health and wealthy in order to maintain the education standard. The 2015 Pacific education for all review by Unesco recommended, among others, more attention on the quality of education at all levels.
It said that improving the quality of education and student learning outcomes is only possible when there is a qualified, professionally trained, motivated, committed and well-supported teaching workforce.
Achieving this will involve improving teacher training and opportunities for professional development and ensuring conditions of service are up to standard.
Quality in education will also be supported by good quality learning materials and learning environments that are safe, healthy, gender-sensitive, inclusive and conducive to learning.
In addition, teachers and educators as well as learners need to be well versed in the use of ICT to improve access to education, enhance teaching and learning, and strengthen education management.
Whereas teachers in developed countries are among the highest paid civil servants, PNG and its Pacific neighbours cannot even dream of matching them at all.
But gradually and small steps can be taken to improve teaching.
Salary adjustments for teachers over the years were at best inconsistent with the trend of rapidly rising cost of living.
That is true for most other public servants as well.
As teachers battled on over the years under conditions most are well aware of, the tuition fee-free education policy introduced a few years ago has worsened a critical situation in large numbers of students per teacher.
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 subsidy policy have pointed out that large numbers of students could easily compromise the quality of education as teacher interaction with individual students is limited.
Thus, average or slow learners are denied the extra assistance they need.
Any subsidy policy is intended for greater access to education by children from families who could not afford it without such an intervention.
The next obvious step should be improved teacher education or incentives to achieve quality teaching and outcomes.
What we have been paying our teachers is perhaps a reflection of how we perceive teaching as a profession.
For many years teachers colleges have picked their quota of secondary schools but the cream of the crop opted for universities or other colleges to train for better paying jobs.
More work is needed to now make teaching an attractive option for the brightest young people coming out of secondary schools so they can mentor the next generation of students.
There is an inevitable shift in the PNG economy from the primary sector only technology and innovation.
Competent and happy teachers are crucial to laying the foundation for such a shift.