‘At 55, teachers are in very good health’

MINISTER for Employment, Productivity and Industrial Relations, Agni Deo Singh, says the extension of the retirement age to 60 does not necessarily mean younger people will not find employment.

He referenced the teaching sector, saying there had been a lot of issues with school leadership in the past.

“At 55, teachers are in very good health and they’ve been in leadership positions for a few years only and they have five more years of good leadership services to provide,” he said.

“We have been losing all that very badly. So with that back at the end of the day, it is the schools and the children, it is the quality of education that will benefit because you cannot take experience away and compensate with an academic qualification.

“It doesn’t mean somebody who has come with a PhD with six, seven years of service or 10 years of service is equal to someone who has 25 or 30 years of service in leadership, through the system into the leadership, can never be equated. It’s quite different.

“Particularly with the ground you need to work through the mill to understand the ropes, understand the system, to acquire those knowledge and skills and experience that you only get when you get that on the job, hands-on experience. We have all learned that way.”

He said there was still a need to employ more teachers in schools around the country, and there were instances whereby teachers holding secondary school teaching qualifications were recruited to teach primary school students.

“I think in teaching itself, we require a lot more teachers in primary school, there is a dire shortage. We have got secondary school teachers with secondary school qualifications teaching in primary schools.

“Now we will have to retrain those teachers. We can’t lay them off. You know, we have to retrain them and they’re secondary school teachers, but we are still faced with a lot of shortage of teachers.

“A lot of brain drain has taken place. Yes.

And then we put these large class sizes in the primary schools to actually address which has never been attended to despite all those calls being made.”

Mr Singh said in cases where a teacher had to take on larger volumes of students in a single class, a portion of students would be left behind, resulting in a serious issue.

“Non-readers is a serious issue for us. We need to address this. So yes, while we will have mature people in leadership, we still need a lot of establishments, a lot more teachers at the lower level assisting.

“So it’s all about getting the resources together and just employing more teachers. It will be a challenge in terms of funding, knowing what we have been burdened with, we have inherited in terms of debts, but we have to make sure that we improve the delivery of education.”