Editorial | Good move in education

Fayval Williams last week delivered two bits of very encouraging news.

First, the haemorrhaging of teachers from Jamaica’s classrooms has slowed dramatically this year. The forecast up to September, when the new school year begins, is for 72 per cent fewer resignations – 427 compared to 1,538 in 2022.

This year’s figure, according to Ms Williams, the education minister, represents 1.7 per cent of the teachers employed by the Government compared to the 6.2 per cent staff who left last year.

It is not known whether the recent pay hikes to teachers, as part of a broader reclassification of public sector jobs, has anything to do with the falloff in resignations. Whatever the cause, this newspaper shares the minister’s delight at the outcomes. For all things being equal, it should mean less of a scramble to fill teaching slots when schools reopen, an issue that is all too familiar at the start of most school years but particularly acute in 2022.

Ms Williams’ other important announcement relates to the first: the policy decision allowing school boards the flexibility to hire replacement for teachers who go on extended leave. This, too, should help ease the September crush.

Both developments are reminders of two other outstanding policy matters to which Ms Williams must turn her attention – one of which, teacher entitlements, pops up sporadically on Jamaica’s education agenda without resolution; and another, which this newspaper recently addressed as an issue of grave urgency: resetting the mission of primary schools. This must include ending the automatic annual promotion of children who can’t read and do sums to their age and grade levels and underpinned by legislation.

With respect to the first issue, while Ms Williams didn’t give a figure, she reported that more teachers than last year were going off, or have gone off, on extended leave of between four and eight months. History suggests that there are teachers who might be away even longer.

DEAL WITH GAPS

It is in part to deal with gaps created by these leave entitlements that the Government has, in a significant policy shift, pre-cleared school boards to hire teachers to fill genuine vacancies or to close spaces left by others away on approved long vacations. Significantly, schools will allow teachers who are officially on long leave, for the period, to be engaged to teach at their own or other institutions.

“Principals … who are going off on their long leave can be retained as well but not as a principal,” Ms Williams said. “They can teach in their school … or they can teach in another school.”

Extending the services of teachers on the verge of retirement, bringing back capable retirees on a part-time basis, and hiring pre-trained teachers with special skills were among a raft of other initiatives announced by the minister.

This is the kind of forward-leaning resourcefulness this newspaper has long hoped for from Ms Williams (rather than muddled and distracting ‘sixth form’ projects and nonsensical plans to introduce technical and vocational training to primary school children with their A-B-Cs) to begin to seriously address the deep crisis in Jamaica’s education outcomes. Indeed, these emergency measures are not at odds with our proposed broad public discussion on the Patterson Report on the fundamental transformation of the education system.

But Ms Williams must ensure, in this regard, that her current interventions are, at best, only temporary fixes rather than permanent solutions to dysfunctional arrangements relating to the employment of teachers and their leave entitlements.

ATTENTION

In his 2023 intervention in the annual Budget Debate, one of her predecessors, Ronald Thwaites, drew the public’s attention to the fact that teachers, who already enjoyed long holidays, were entitled to four months’ leave with pay after every five years of service.

At the time of his remarks, Mr Thwaites had noted that a teacher employed before September 2003 could apply for 52 days leave on full salary and get another 40 days on half pay. Those who got their jobs after September 2003 were entitled to 40 days’ leave on full pay and another 28 days more at half their salaries.

Further, a teacher, after two years’ service, was eligible to one year fully paid study leave and could be granted up to another year off without pay. It didn’t matter what that teacher studied and whether it was relevant to the education system.

Notably, too, teachers are employed to specific schools and not the central ministry. So teachers can’t just be transferred to where their particular skills are needed even though there might be an oversupply of that skill in the institutions at which they teach and a shortage elsewhere.

Noting that inefficiency of those arrangements and that the leave entitlements could no longer be afforded, Mr Thwaites called for dialogue and negotiations with the teachers union, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), to restructure the schemes. For his efforts, he was likened to a “mongrel” by the JTA’s then president-elect and teachers’ college lecturer, Doran Dixon. Relatively little has changed.

A decade on, those issues remain relevant and should be on Ms Williams’ agenda. So, too, should be this newspaper’s recommendation that the vital mission of the primary school system be reoriented to ensure that every child who completes grade seven is as literate and numerate as is to be expected of a 12-year-old, who must be fully capable of absorbing secondary education. It is untenable that 40 per cent of grade six students fall below this standard in language arts and 47 per cent in the case of mathematics.