By HOMELAND MEDIA TEAM
A section of education consultants have urged the Ministry of Education and Sports to formulate a team that will visit all government-aided institutions to establish the actual number of teachers nearing retirement age to enable early planning to circumvent a looming human resource crisis.
This comes on the heels of the Education Service Commission validation exercise that was conducted from November 2021 to April 2022 which revealed that government-aided secondary schools and tertiary institutions face a potential human resource crisis due to the high number of teaching staff nearing retirement age.
The law states that a teacher is mandated to retire from active service when he/she clocks the age of sixty (60).
Speaking to a local radio station on Tuesday morning, renowned Educationist and Consultant Fagil Mandy says that the crisis can be nipped in the bud, and should not be allowed to occur.
“First of all, they (Ministry of Education and Sports) need to change the way they are doing things presently. They need to do things faster. Secondly, they need to go down to the institutions and carry out a thorough verification,” adding that he doesn’t opine that the November 2021-April 2023 verification exercise was incompetent but it was done after a long time without no verification of staff in these institutions to know the real threat of the number of teachers who are set to retire, for proper planning,” said Fagil Mandy.
He also noted that government must frequently monitor staff in these institutions so as to have a database of the teachers nearing retirement and avert knee-jerk-like verifications of teaching staff in government schools and institutions.
The education enthusiast underscored the need to set up a competent team by the Ministry of Education and Sports, whose work will solely be to monitor staff who are nearing retirement and report to the Education Service Commission so that recruitment of new teachers is made to avoid a human resource debacle in government-aided institutions that form the lion share, which implies that many learners would be affected if the teacher to students ratio is not balanced.
Email:hommelandnewspaper@gmail.com
