By Bampia James Bundu
Education for All Sierra Leone coalition, (EFA-SL), in collaboration with Western Area Budget Education and Advocacy Network (WABEAN), and support from Action Aid International, has urged the government to invest more in education to achieve quality.
At a round table to discuss issues bordering on community teachers at the CHASL Hall, Kingharman Road in Freetown, EFA’s coordinator, for EFA-SL Joseph Cobinah noted that it was high time the government invested more money in education “so as to improve the standard of education in the country and a to ensure that more teachers are employed and community teachers are well taken care of by the government”.
He said the purpose of the meeting was to ensure that participants from across the country “chat the way forward” on the importance of community teachers in various communities and the role they play as they impact knowledge on pupils. He said they would also discuss the manner in which the government was treating teachers as well as draw the education ministry’s attention to issues surrounding recruitment, “especially those in our rural communities. Transfer of teachers and payment of subsidies would also be discussed.
Cobinah noted that condition of community teachers in the country was “very volatile as the government is not in any way prepared to employ these categories of people serving in the classroom”.
As a matter of policy, he went on, the ministry of education could only employ trained and qualified teachers and not those who were neither trained nor qualified. He added that these were the only set of teachers prepared to teach in rural community schools.
Education advisor at Action Aid International, Cecilia Sannoh, explained that her organization’s educational program focused on providing quality public education to children from poor and marginalized communities. She revealed that their target was to ensure that 20,000 children in Sierra Leone had access to quality public education by 2017.
She revealed that her organization operated in seven districts across the country, adding that based on a research they carried out recently, “half of primary school teachers in our operational areas are qualified and most of them prefer teaching in the urban schools”. She said that they had been supporting untrained and unqualified teachers to attend distance education programs, conducting service training for all teachers in targeted schools and also lobbying the government to increase budgetary allocations to the educational sector.
She called on the government to consider increasing its efforts to ensuring that the issues of quality education became a thing of the past.
Chairman, conference of secondary school principals, Sylvester Meheux, commend EFA-SL “for organizing such a forum because the government needs to do more in order to actualized quality education in the country”. He confirmed that there were still teachers in the country who carried fake certificates and posed as teachers in some of the schools.
“In as much as I am not against community teachers, I believe if we are to get quality education for our pupils, we need trained and qualified teachers to teach them for us”, Meheux said. He suggested that “special allowances” should be set aside by government for teachers who teach in remote areas of the country “as that will encourage more teachers to teach in those areas”.
Clark of the parliamentary oversight committee on education, Abrahim Jalloh, assured EFA-SL and all participants of the committee’s support to such deliberations. He appealed that they deliberate well and come up with formidable recommendations that would be presented to the committee for onward reaction.
(C) Politico 02/07/14
