7 000 new jobs for teachers
Government has resumed civil service recruitment with at least 7 000 qualified teachers set to sign employment contracts to fill vacancies that have arisen mainly due to demand for Early Childhood Development (ECD) educators.
It is understood that treasury has since given the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education the nod to hire the teaching staff.
The permission comes despite a standing Government position to halt recruitments within the civil service citing financial challenges and need to meet conditions set by international money lenders for fresh loans.
Zimbabwe froze the hiring of Government employees as it sought to meet some staff rationalisation and national expenditure reduction conditions set by the International Monetary Fund towards the end of last year.
The country has outstanding obligations to the Bretton Woods lender of about $11 billion and has since devised a repayment scheme together with other measures to cut expenditure.
The Sunday Mail has gathered that about 5 800 new teachers will soon be engaged by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education as ECD teachers.
An additional 500 teaching staff will be deployed to fill vacant posts within the junior schools while 732 go to secondary education.
The high demand for qualified teachers at the ECD level is a result of the expansion of the lower level education that was introduced some three years ago.
Zimbabwe introduced ECD A and B in 2013 and initially few schools established facilities to cater for kindergartens, but the programme is now full scale countrywide.
Primary and Secondary Education Minister, Lazarus Dokora said Treasury had approved the recruitment of 7 032 teachers this year.
Minister Dokora said the country’s education sector was facing severe shortage of ECD teachers hence the approval to employ trained teachers.
“We hope to bring our establishment of qualified teachers to acceptable standards.
“The good thing is Treasury has given the nod to the Public Service Commission to recruit 7 032 teachers and the majority of these will go to our ECD, which we have been improving since we started the programme in 2013,” he said.
Minister Dokora said there were about 427 826 ECD pupils being taught by a compliment of about 4 000 qualified teachers and an undisclosed number of university graduates who have majored in non-teaching disciplines.
“Most teachers in ECD are not trained so we hope to increase the figure, some of them are general teachers and not qualified to deal with ECD. But we hope to improve,” he said.
According to the Government latest statistics, in 2014, there were 117 490 practicing teachers of which 98 263 were trained while 19 227 were not.
The country has 2 374 secondary schools and 5 805 primary schools with an enrollment of nearly four million.
Minister Dokora said the country’s learning institutions were now manned by 80 percent qualified teachers. The remaining 20 percent constitutes university and Advanced Level graduates who are recruited by schools as relief teachers.