Teacher Registration

The decision by the Minister of Education, the Honourable Andrew Holness, to require all teachers to be registered seems to me to be a strange one.  The first area of concern is why the teachers?  Policemen, firemen, doctors, nurses and other public workers will not be required to register.  There seems to be the perception that by registering teachers the quality of teaching will improve.  However, it is not registration of teachers that will solve our problems in education it is ensuring that only qualified persons are employed to teach.

I have been stressing that a part of finance is ensuring that good governance takes place.  The job of monitoring the teachers belongs to the principals of the schools.  They in turn should be accountable to the school board which ensures that all relevant reports are sent to the Ministry of Education.  It is not the job of government to monitor individual teachers but to monitor the performance of the school as a whole.  This could cause a problem to teachers as to recognizing to whom they are accountable.  If the recommendations of the monitoring body are different from the directions of the principal then which should be followed?

Another consideration is whether there will be a cost to the teacher of registering with the ministry and what will the process involve.  If the ministry is going to have a system of registration which is inefficient and takes months to register a teacher then this will create other problems.  Teachers are already underpaid and if they are then required to pay a registration fee out of their small pay then there could be significant opposition.  The cost of implementing and monitoring this system has to be bourne by someone. At a time when resources are scarce this seems to be money that will not be well spent.

The role of leadership is to set the direction that one wishes to go and to set in place persons who will carry out those directives.  A system then has to be established to monitor the outcome to see if the objectives are being met.  If the objectives are not being met the corrective action should be taken.  It is too easy an idea to want to monitor the individuals but true leadership relies on getting all parties working together to achieve the stated objectives.  Let the principals monitor the teachers, the job of the ministry is to focus on the schools.