Unqualified teachers redeployed

THE Civil Service Commission has started the process of redeploying teachers who hold non-teaching qualifications as part of the Government's staff rationalisation programme recommended in the Civil Service Report of 2015, an official has said.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education Dr Sylvia Utete-Masango said the teachers were being re-assigned to other ministries and Government departments where their qualifications were relevant.

Dr Utete-Masango said her ministry had submitted, to the CSC, names of teachers that hold degrees in different areas but do not have teaching qualifications. The Government employed thousands of unqualified teachers who had bachelor's degrees in other areas as a stopgap measure to deal with shortage of teachers as a result of brain drain.

However, the fate of unqualified teachers had been hanging in the balance, as the Government started intensifying efforts to ensure the country's schools were manned by qualified personnel.

"The Civil Service Commission (CSC) has asked us to submit names and statistics of those that are in the system and do not have teaching qualifications but have degrees and they are being redeployed in ministries that would need their areas of expertise.

"Some have been deployed to the department of immigration, and quite a number of economists have been redeployed to the Ministry of Economic Planning (and Investment Promotion) and some have been deployed to the Ministry of Rural Development (and Preservation of National Culture and Heritage). This rationalisation is ongoing," she said.

Dr Utete-Masango said those who wished to stay in the education sector were being encouraged to acquire teaching qualifications.

"ZOU (Zimbabwe Open University) has come up with a post-graduate Diploma in Education programme and this was accredited by Zimche (Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education) in 2016. So we have quite a number, we have actually been taking statistics and we have communicated to provinces encouraging those with no pedagogy to actually take up the diploma.

Those that have non-teaching degrees have actually taken up the diplomas and they are at varying levels of training," she said.

Meanwhile, the Government has started recruiting 2 300 teachers ahead of schools opening for the second term. This comes after the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education requested the recruitment of 7 000 teachers to enable full implementation of the new education curriculum.

"We also have to consider areas that have critical shortage, like the infants, mainly because statistics are there. We know exactly the shortage that we have and at what level so we need to rationalise. We also have a critical shortage in Mathematics and Sciences," she said.

Dr Utete-Masango said while her ministry would have wanted more teachers to be recruited, shortage of resources was constraining Government to satisfy that desire. New learning areas that were introduced under the new education curriculum have also added to the need for the Government to recruit additional staff as the areas require specialised training.

Government has also initiated the teacher capacity development programme which allows teachers to enhance their educational qualifications to be in sync with modern trends and requirements of the new curriculum framework.