GTU wants careful screening of teachers recruited from overseas

Feb 21, 2011 News

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– fears persons with deviant traits may enter system

The Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) has assumed a proactive mode in wake of the recent disclosure by Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon that Government plans to recruit graduate Math and Science teachers from overseas.
According GTU President Colin Bynoe, the Union intends to not only monitor the process of recruitment but also the actual teaching capabilities of the teachers that will take up the offer.
“We will monitor continuously because we have members who will be working with some of them and they will look over. They will monitor to know whether they are showing the competence and what qualifications they show; we will check to see if we are getting mileage for our money…” Bynoe asserted during a recent press conference at the Union’s Woolford Avenue headquarters.
In light of the spat of sexual offences that have occurred in schools of recent, the GTU President highlighted concerns about the possibility of persons of undesirable character being brought into the education system.  He highlighted his suspicions that it may very well prove to be a near-impossible task to ascertain the moral quality of persons ahead of them being inducted into the classroom to teach the nation’s children. “The Union is very concerned about sexual offences already existing in schools…What about a paedophile coming into the system (from overseas)? I don’t know how we will get their backgrounds checked; so this is a major concern to us.”
For this reason, Bynoe speculated that proper perimeters will have to be worked out as to how those selected for recruitment will be scrutinised.  “When things like that (sexual offences) really get going they can really snowball into something else.  Our own people might want to copy what they do and then we could have another problem.” As such the GTU President underscored the need for clear guidelines to check the background and a rigid monitoring scheme to be brought into effect in order to protect the nation’s children even as measures take shape to improve the level of education.
The need for the recruitment of Mathematics and Science teachers overseas has been premised on the fact that the locally trained teachers have been opting to offer their skills abroad thereby leaving a significant void in the system. But according to Bynoe, the education sector should not have been faced with the existing dilemma. He revealed that it has been on repeated occasions that the union has requested of the Education Ministry that discreet scholarships be granted to teachers in specific subject areas, the likes of integral areas such as Mathematics and the Sciences. This suggestion, he said, was intended to help improve teachers’ content. “The Minister has agreed and we are looking, during our discussion with the Ministry, to have persons trained (even now).”
According to Bynoe, the union plans to engage the Education Ministry to determine, “what really is the contractual arrangement that the Government will be putting in place to bring overseas teachers to teach here. So we need to know what sorts of contractual arrangements they are making.” This must be clarified, the GTU President insisted, since it is customary that whenever local teachers are contracted to work in the Caribbean and elsewhere they are in receipt of the same salaries to that of the native teachers.  The GTU President has also questioned whether overseas based Guyanese teachers or even local persons who are presently in the employ of the Ministry of Education could also be eligible for the recruitment process.  “Will they fall into the same remuneration package? Will they be accepted? This is a concern to us.  We do hope that not because they are from overseas that these overseas people will be given super-salaries but that they will be treated just like Guyanese teachers.”

But according to Dr Luncheon, “the urgency in responding to the created need for Mathematics and Science teachers now has…more or less outstripped what national production levels can provide and this is why a decision has had to be examined and looked at to return to an older model of addressing the human resource needs of the teaching profession.” Reports are that any remuneration arrangements will be in keeping with models used in the past.
President Jagdeo has since disclosed that Cabinet’s initiative to recruit graduate teachers from overseas to supplement national demand mainly in the areas of Science and Mathematics, will not be final until after discussions are held between the Government and the Teaching Service Commission (TSC).

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