16 Sep 2013

The Ministry of Education and Skills Development is consulting with stakeholders with a view to eventually ask Parliament to rescind inclusion of teaching profession under the Public Service Act, Assistant Minister Patrick Masimolole has said.

Addressing teachers in Mmankgodi recently, he said the teaching profession should be separated from the rest of the civil service because of its peculiar issues. 

“Teaching is not a 0730-1630 job, because teachers are expected to prepare and mark learners’ work and do extra-curricular work which is normally after government hours, that’s why we also have a challenge of overtime running into millions. I think we made a mistake in the beginning by grouping teachers with rest of government employees, but they, police and military personnel their jobs are special,” he said.

On other issues, he said government did not condone companies that failed to supply on time. Sadly, he said, most of them were local companies. “We need to have an exit clause or enter into short term contract because most of these companies don’t perform because they know we are stuck with them. But with short term contracts if they don’t perform we part ways and try others,” said Mr Masimolole.

Mr Masimolole implored teachers to respect their profession and act as role models. Such behaviour would include not having sexual relations with learners and not taking alcohol in their presence.

He said teachers and stakeholders should work as a team to combat  an ever growing problem of alcoholism and substance abuse in Botswana schools. The assistant minister also said the education was concerned with shortage of accommodation for teachers and as such where possible the ministry would buy houses from estate businesses such as Botswana Housing Corporation as building structures would be costly to government.

He said there must be a conducive environment for learning and teaching if schools were to perform better. To that end government had improved levels of operation for teachers and expected them to produce good results.

An education officer, Ms Lesego Masitara said the Kweneng region was over staffed with 202 teachers. She said the region was trying to assign the teachers their proper roles as most of them were taking far too low loads such as 15 periods per week or two classes per week for one teacher.

She said of the above numbers 166 would be transferred out of Kweneng because they could not be absorbed by the system.She said the situation was made worse by the establishment register which limited the number of teachers in each school.

Ms Masitara was responding complaints from teachers which included slow progression, stoppage of acting, non-replacement of staff on training and confinement leave, accommodation shortage and overtime.  Ends