Editorial - Focus on the teaching profession

THE warning from Mr. Paul Adams, the newly-elected President of the Jamaica Teachers' Association, that it will take 20 years for the country to recover from the loss of good quality teachers to overseas jobs, should neither be taken lightly nor brushed aside. If Mr. Adams's theory is to be disproved then the corrective action has to begin now.

The corrective action will have to include a programme to encourage and induce some of our bright young people to enter the teaching profession. An enormous hurdle that the Ministry of Education will have to overcome is the blunder of a year ago when there was an active programme to lay off somewhere in the region of 324 teachers on the ground that there was overstaffing in the system. Which is hardly a context in which to encourage new recruits.

In fairness, the Ministry of Education could not have foreseen that the New York school district would have mounted an active and successful programme to recruit some 300 Jamaican teachers for this September. The effect of this is that we have gone from seeming oversupply to shortage in the course of a year. Even more critical is that those who have been recruited for overseas jobs are mainly from mathematics, the sciences, languages and information technology; disciplines where we have never had an adequate supply of teachers.

The ministry has been forced to re-employ some of the teachers who it had forced into early retirement a year ago to make up for the shortages that face the system come September. But Mr. Adams says re-employing retired teachers or relying on new graduates from the teachers' colleges will not provide adequate support for the system. It will take six years, he says, to replace a trained graduate and 20 years to get back that level of experience.

Which suggests an urgent need to revisit the manpower planning as it relates to the teaching profession. Perhaps we ought to begin with the acceptance that there is nothing wrong, on the face of it, with our teachers going off to seek better-paying jobs abroad. There has been some tradition in this regard with Jamaican-trained teachers serving with distinction in many of the islands of the Caribbean, in Africa and in several metropolitan countries.

The manpower focus should take this reality into consideration and train teachers not only for our own growing needs but also for export.

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