On teacher recruitment & training

Focusing on teacher recruitment, training at primary level is quintessential to improve Pakistan’s education system

Ask any expert what really is the problem with Pakistan’s education sector, and nobody will be able to give a straightforward answer. The most complicated problems, however, have simple and obvious solutions that bluff our minds into looking elsewhere. Fixing the education sector is one of those problems that wasn’t complicated to begin with, but with the passage of time, became complex and today, millions of dollars, and foreign aid money is being spent to fix the basic pillars of education: administration, teaching quality, curriculum etc.

While I have written extensively on education sector reforms from a macro-level, I believe that focusing on teacher recruitment and training at the primary level of education is quintessential to improving the overall quality of Pakistan’s education system and feed the right students into higher education. Like other public sector institutions in Pakistan, the education sector has also seen a major dwindling of quality. The good part, however, about our education sector is that we have the systems and infrastructure in place, which means that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel or try anything radical.

What we need is perhaps, simple solutions like improving the already existing structure through new and innovative techniques. The challenging part is that while the skeleton is there, what we lack is the required human resource : teacher recruitment and training, and this is precisely what must be focused upon. In terms of recruitment, first and foremost, is the need of depoliticisation. For decades, during the tenures of successive governments, political appointments in thousands were made in the education sector for teachers. The saying goes, ‘if you can’t get any job, be a teacher’. Today, as the provinces try hard for education sector reforms, the biggest challenge faced is that of political appointees who were recruited as teachers with little regard for merit. Most of those appointed took the jobs for the additional stipends they were offered, which supplemented their incomes from their regular business concerns. We ended up having absent teachers from classes and ghost schools. Hence, there is an urgent need to halt any further political, non-merit based appointments of teachers, and weed out the existing rotten apples.

Secondly, increasing the entry-level merit for primary school teachers is essential. The Punjab government, in its 2014 policy, required primary school teachers to at least have a Bachelor’s degree. The other provinces must follow suit too.

Third, to attract good candidates towards primary school teaching, there has to be an incentive in the form of higher salaries and clear career progression. The primary school teachers in Pakistan are defining how our future generations will turn out. Our priorities must be right and we need to be spending a lot more on attracting the right people and making teaching a desirable career option.

In terms of teacher training, under the National Educational Policy (1998-2010) and Education Sector Reforms Action Plan (2001-2006), Teachers Resource Centres  were started, which was an innovative initiative. However, the results of these centres have been rather depressing. The paradox is that while public sector teachers receive more number of hours of training and facilities compared with those in the private sector, the overall performance and quality of the latter is arguably better.

The area of training could easily be improved through public-private partnerships. Provincial governments should outsource teacher training to specialised training institutes that are able to utilise the infrastructure and resources at their disposal to improve teacher quality and deliver results. Besides this, the government should also develop a comprehensive professional development policy for teacher training, as currently all teacher training is donor-funded.

While fixing these basics will go a long way, there is a lot more that needs to be done in terms of administration. A little administrative manoeuvring can bring in transformational changes in the education sector. What is needed is the integration of monitoring and evaluation of teacher performance, plus setting standards for the results they produce. Without defining Key Performance Indicators, it is impossible to gauge teachers’ performance — after all, performance has to be gauged against some indicator. While the ministry of education did develop professional standards for teachers in 2008, they need to be followed in the true sense to improve teachers’ performance.

Fixing the education sector, I have always maintained, is not exactly a problem of quantum physics and doesn’t necessarily need huge sums. What it needs is a proper well thought out vision and a plan, public-private partnerships and strict monitoring and evaluation of the system to check the results teachers produce. This exercise will not only improve the area of teacher recruitment and training at the primary level, but will also go a long way in contributing to the improvement of the overall education sector.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 2^nd, 2015.

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