An urgent need has arisen to review the structure of the Public Teaching Service

Apr 25, 2021 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

By now, the fluctuations of the pandemic across the world would not encourage a high degree of optimism about its cessation in the near future, even for the adult generations. The latter, must therefore be puzzling over the growth and development of their varying generations of children in a dispensation that offers individual and collective stressors at home, but possibly more critically in the school systems that continue to keep adjusting, albeit without any clear determination of a strategy that would address not only structural and technological issues, but most sensitively emotional health and safety issues.
What strategies have to be conceptualised should logically involve all the players, the relevant administrative decision-makers, the professional educators, and parents, with a possible injection from the older student body? It is the latter’s health more than any other that may be challenged. Bear in mind too, that there will be future educators amongst them, but who at the same time could be attracted to new and other employment opportunities in a changing work environment that outstretches traditional borders, given the increasing competition from aggressive foreign employers.
It is against this contentious background that the need arises to review the structure of the Public Teaching Service, as a matter of urgency. Established in the colonial era, the Teaching Service Commission has not served teachers at all well; while for some unintelligible reason their representation has consistently faltered – resulting in a constipated compensation structure awarded to the only public servants who have to achieve set targets but are accountable to not only the employer, but also their students and their parents.
To this day, every Administration has been indifferent to a fixed structure of 28 so-called salary grades. Space does not allow provision of a more detailed analysis, but hopefully the sampling, which follows may suffice to portray some fundamental flaws in structure, alongside comparabilities in a 14 grade Public Service.
Actually the abovementioned 28 Grades are shown in the budget as 20, made up however as follows:

 

 

 

 

But the following samples offer some discouraging comparisons.

 

 

But there exists the following contradiction in terms of ‘permanent’ temporary positions, such as:

 

 

Quite apart from job comparisons, how does one contemplate the illogic of a career of ‘Temporary’ promotions? But then as a ‘Non-Graduate’, one can proceed from the position of Non-Graduate Senior Assistant Master (TS4 – up to TS13) where one becomes a Non-Graduate Head of a Grade A school.
Those who are still interested might wonder further about the following disposition of Heads and Deputy Heads in the same Grades of Schools.

Comparative Ranking of Heads and Deputy Heads in the same Grades of Schools

 

 

 

 

P – Primary
S – Secondary

How it must be asked are the substantial differentials in Grades and salaries computed for the same level of responsibility? Where is the motivational factor towards productivity?
After all this, the reader would empathise with teachers’ embarrassment with a salary structure that:
Tremours from TS1 and TS2, both at the minimum and maximum of $74,184; where the scale of Grade TS 5 (B) – $156, 685 – $169,341 is greater than that of the next higher scale TS5 (B1) – $153,886 – $166, 544; where TS6 reach $157,443 – $174,621; while TS7 (A) reads $160,977 – $173,854; as TS 8 (A) reads $175,995 – $193,169, and TS 8 (B) reads $178,147 – $191,027;
TS 14 reads $227, 514 – $256,920, while TS 15 reads $236,103 – $253,275 all ignored by the diligent decision-makers over the decades.
But perhaps the greatest piece of obstinacy is the fixture of a grade boldly described as SPECIAL at simply $332,841 – a compliment to those who have risen to be Principals – CPCE, GTI, NATI, LTI.
Hopefully in addition to the Guyana Teachers Union, they would be consulted about the reconstruction process, bearing in mind how many of their products will seek entrance to the University of Guyana whose leaders as they must be, are already strategising on the way forward and upward into a new creative technological education dispensation – of virtual reality.
The value of the educator at all levels demand the most comprehensive review, bearing in mind that their performance will continue to be target oriented, and will be depended upon to produce the quantity and quality of (20,000) scholarship winners foreseen to be needed for a growing competitive economy, so much of which will be managed by non-locals.

Yours truly,
E. B. John

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