No thanks to teachers

Feb 20, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

The Editorial in the SN of Tuesday 14 February on the blighted socio-economic environment teachers have to increasingly endure, makes depressing reading – indeed for consumers and the very children they teach and the parents whom they must satisfy, however combatively.

In the meantime, it is their employer – Ministry of Education — who along with the Teachers’ Service Commission, albeit abetted by the inept Guyana Teachers Union, with whom teachers actually have to comply. For they overwhelmingly demoralised by how the respective agencies disregard fundamental humanity. For the employment (infra) structure in which they are embedded has been totally ignored ever since its creation in the colonial era. It is a job structure that not only differs substantively from that of the counterpart Public Service established in the 1990s, but substantively defies common sense. The following sample of Job Grades remain puzzling in terms of basic career aspirations.

TS2 (A) Temporary Unqualified Teacher

(B) Temporary Qualified Master III

TS3 – Trained Teacher

– Temporary Qualified Master

-Assistant Lecturer II+I – GTI/NATI

– Instructor – GITC, CSHE, LTI

TS4-Non-Graduate Senior Assistant Master

TS5 – Head of Department

-Non-Graduate Senior Master

-Non-Graduate Head, Grade D Nursery

The contradictions on being promoted to a ‘Temporary’ position does not speak for itself. It simply confuses. The above is compounded by expectations of ‘Non-Graduate’ promotions.

Like the Public Service, the overall salary scales, cramped as they are, continue to be overtaken by non-negotiable periodic increases. There is absolutely no recognition of the successes of their products who persistently win Caribbean awards. Only the Minister of Education is applauded – probably for retaining productive underpaid teachers, of whom those at the highest grade are usually ‘scaled’ up to a ‘Fixed Salary’ – for the rest of their lives. Somehow the GTU will be satisfied that their members’ recently promised promotions may simply earn further in this most unacceptable Colonial ‘era’tic compensation (infra) structure.

Regards,

B. John

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