Another of the 11 proposals in the PUP's education reform plan is to provide all of the nearly 6,000 teachers countrywide with full pedagogical training. Well, from the Education Minister's perspective, that won't be hard to do because his Ministry has already provided 84% of the teachers with the necessary training. Here's how explained why this proposal isn't significant or ground-breaking:
Hon. Patrick Faber - Minister of Education
"One of the things that they are claiming that they will do is to increase the number of trained teachers to 100%. Now, the only reason they are able to make that promise is that under the UDP's administration for the last decade or so, there has been a marked increase of in excess of 50% - the recorded is there - of trained teachers. The People's United Party, and in fact, previous governments of both parties were never able to achieve that. And in fact, where Francis Fonseca and the PUP left us in 2008, in terms of teacher education and contributions to teacher training, we would never have reached where we are at today in terms of the number of trained teachers. We're at 84% trained teachers, up from in 2008, and before. We were at something like 30-33% or thereabouts. So, there is marked improvement, and all those improvements in terms of teacher qualifications came as a result of our government's investment in the teachers. Remember the certificate in the education program? Remember the support we got from the Banana measures and the Accompanying sugar measures. These are the kinds of initiatives - and also Equip 1 - which helped us to train our teachers. These are significant investments. So, I reject out-of-hand, the PUP's position that all of this money has been wasted. Or is it that they are telling the teachers all that has been invested in their development, that now causes them to be able to claim larger salaries -because when teachers become more qualified, and we've seen now where at least 50% the teaching staff have increased their training, and are now being paid because they're qualified. The criticism really then - coming from them - is that we're wasting money to qualify teachers. And if it is they are saying that the results are not improving, then it really is a criticism against the teachers, and the BNTU in particular needs to take note of that."
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