Solve teachers’ salaries issues now

THE PNG Teaching Service Commission has never found any solutions to the issues faced with teachers’ salaries.
The commission failed to conduct research on why teachers continue to experience salary issues every year and rectify them once and for all.
It appears salary issues facing teachers are a norm and we have learnt to live with it.
The commission cannot continue to neglect teachers.
Its inability to find solutions proves that it is incompetent and does not have policies to address problems.
For instance, hundreds of teachers who graduated one or two years ago are yet to be put on the Education Department’s payroll system, pending the graduate teacher quality checks.
Do we have fulltime officers engaged to conduct a routine nationwide audits or graduate teacher quality checks that would only take a few weeks or months?
Graduate teachers from the University of Goroka will have to wait for about 11 months without pay until their degree certificates are printed and presented to the commission November to start receiving salaries.
The commission needs to communicate with universities to allow final year teachers to graduate at the end of every year so that their certificates are submitted together with resumption duty forms as early as February instead of making them wait till the end of the year.
We cannot continue this madness.
If it was in the private sector, the Teaching Service Commission would have been made redundant and officers terminated for non-performance.
Good teachers have to be taken care of well in order to give our children their best.
The commission knows better than any other department that a country’s nation building lies in the hands of its teachers.
Teachers are the important part of driving development agendas.

Ken Nandawa
Education Adviser – Republic of
Rau’areke