Government: Poor Education Due to Teachers

Minister of Education Zahiya Zareer has said “a lack of quality teachers and capable school administrators” is “the biggest challenge facing the education sector.”

In an interview with Television Maldives earlier this week, the Minister also said poor quality foreign teachers were jeopardising young people’s education.

“This has been the problem last year, this year and even now,” she said. But she promises 2007 will see some much needed changes.

Speaking at a ceremony in Male to mark the beginning of the new academic year yesterday, Zareer said that one of her Ministry’s primary goals was to strengthen the Maldivian education system in order to make it “more effective”.

She said she is committed to starting several new programmes aimed at improving the standards of teachers, which include building a ‘Teacher Resource Centre’ in every atoll and providing advanced teaching courses to educational staff.

Zahiya said one of her main priorities for the new academic year was to, “make sure that the foreign teachers hired have excellent qualifications.”

But without proper funding it will be impossible to hire any teacher of adequate calibre, says Shehenaz Abdulla, Shadow Education Secretary. She claims nearly all the country’s education difficulties boil down to lack of funding.

“The problem is that only 10 per cent of the budget is allocated to education,” says Abdulla. “We can’t pay descent foreign teachers a high enough salary to want to immigrate to the Maldives, so instead foreign teachers who are not good in their own country come to the Maldives to teach. It is a disgrace.”

Abdulla went on to say that another problem is the government can’t distinguish between quality and quantity.

“In 2000 during the government’s educational expansion a mistake was made,” said Abdulla. “The government would proudly say: ‘we trained 200 teachers,’ but in training them so quickly the standards were lowered. As a result, today, we have a lot of teachers who do not have the standards that we expect.”

A study conducted by the Ministry of Higher Education, Employment and Social Security, released last month, showed a significant increase in the number of expatriate employees.

“At the beginning of the year a lot of things are said, but you have to ask yourself: ‘why haven’t they started the academic year by implementing their proposals? Why wait until the middle of the year?…If they are really committed to what they say, then I would expect to see it by now,” said Abdulla.

But the Minister says her commitment is clear, and highlighted the work her department has been doing to improve standards of preschool teachers. She says the government is working hard to identify the problems would soon introduce a new plans.

She also promised all the tsunami damage would be repaired this year, saying several schools were already rebuilt and ready for teaching.

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