Importance of teacher training
It is a well-accepted fact that pre-training is a prerequisite to become a teacher. Teacher service is not like other services and it cannot be compared with any other services because this service is something unique in the mode of delivering the lesson to students. Teachers are appointed to schools in Sri Lanka from the National Colleges of Education where candidates undergo a three year intensive training including one year internship training in schools.
The Ministry of Education also makes direct appointments to schools using the graduates who have completed the Bachelor of Education Degree from various universities in the country every year. Apart from these appointments the government recruits teachers from graduates in different disciplines as per the vacancies for teachers in the country. Since the government extended the pensionable age from 60 to 65 in 2021 for the government servants most of the teachers who were on the verge of retirement did not go on pension due to the government’s new pension scheme. The following year the government declared that the pension age for the government service was 60 and then a large number of teachers went on pension in 2022.
This created a lot of vacancies in the teacher service and the government distributed the Development Officers to schools to provide a temporary solution for the immediate teacher shortage, but these freshly recruited graduates without any pretraining walk into the classes as teachers and some of them took the responsibilities of grade-1classes due to the severe teacher shortage.this process is difficult for both the teachers as well as the students because the teachers who are teaching in the primary classes should have undergone teacher training to handle the small kids in the primary grades. In the meantime the Education Minister has stated that there are many disciplinary issues due to the practice of sending non-trained teachers to schools. The parents on the other hand are eager to find a solution for this burning issue. This is not the fault of the graduates who are serving as teachers in the schools, but it is the fault of the government and the particular stakeholders sending the non-trained graduates to teach in primary classes. The principals and the school management are in a dilemma as to how to conduct classes without the required number of teachers. Hence, it is first and foremost the duty of the government and relevant stakeholders to appoint trained teachers or take an effective measures to train the non-trained graduates who are currently performing in some of the schools in the country.