Pascalinah Kabi

THE Ministry of Education and Training will next month undertake a teacher demand and supply study to assess the needs of the education sector.

This was revealed by Education and Training Minister Dr Mahali Phamotse on Thursday while officially opening a two-day validation meeting of the National Teacher Education and Training Policy and national consultation on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) four in Maseru.

She said the National Teacher Education and Training Policy was based on a 2012 Teacher Initiative for Sub-Saharan Africa study and would provide a framework for training educators.

“Like other developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Lesotho aims to be self-sufficient in the training of educators at all levels of the education system,” Dr Phamotse said, adding the Lesotho College of Education and National University of Lesotho trained educators for primary and secondary schools.

She however noted the in-service training was still fragmented.

“. . . the diagnostic analysis of teacher education and training raises a number of concerns about the quality of programmes, the apparent incongruence between the design of some programmes and their implementation, and the efficiency of the current system of preparing candidates for the teaching profession,” said the minister.

“The declining standards of education, unprofessional behavior of most of the teachers that leads to numerous dismissals from the teaching services leave much to be desired as in as far as teaching training is concerned.”

She said one of the reasons for these challenges was the education sector’s failure to select proper candidates to become teachers.

“Currently, there are no separate entry examinations, interviews or aptitude tests to assess the motivation and suitability of candidates applying for the pre-service education and training programme.”

Dr Phamotse said, ideally, the selection should go beyond school-leaving examination grades to include aptitude and psychometric tests.

“Lesotho committed itself to the targets of the Education for All Initiative (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were based on the principles of access, retention, equity, quality, relevance, internal and external efficiency.”

She said in trying to meet the EFA and MDG targets, Lesotho ended up churning out “hundreds, if not thousands of qualified teachers who are unemployed”.

“At the same time, there is a number of unqualified teachers in schools who need to upgrade their qualifications because they do not have required pedagogical skills or content knowledge to cope with the requirements of quality teaching and learning.”

The minister said the supply of teachers was not evenly distributed across the subjects taught in secondary schools.

“As a result, shortages of qualified teachers may still be experienced in limited number of subjects areas, particularly mathematics and the ‘hard sciences’ physics, chemistry and biology,” she said.

To address the imbalance, she said the ministry would undertake a study on teacher demand and supply, supported by the World Bank, to be carried out between September 2016 and March 2017.

Dr Phamotse also said the National Teacher Education and Training Policy sought to respond to the SDG four by ensuring the country produced relevant, quality and adequate educators.

SDG four seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.