Inefficient system makes many teachers illegal
Published:Sunday | October 24, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Tyrone Reid, Sunday Gleaner Reporter
Approximately 30 years after the law was passed requiring all public school teachers to be registered, thousands of educators are in the classrooms without fulfilling this requirement.
Since the law was passed, the government has failed to ensure that unregistered teachers are not hired or paid by the State.
The Education Amendment Act of 1980 stipulates that: "A person shall not teach or be employed as a teacher in a public education institution unless he or she is registered as a trained teacher, pre-trained teacher or an authorised teacher."
But that has not happened and many of the 25,000 public school teachers are operating 'illegally' in State-run institutions.
no updates
Attempts to get an update on the registration of teachers from the Ministry of Education have so far been unsuccessful.
Officials of the ministry and the Jamaica Teaching Council are yet to respond to questions that were sent to them almost two weeks ago.
Dr Canute Thompson, deputy head of the Jamaica Teaching Council, referred The Sunday Gleaner to the education ministry.
However, he admitted that the Council failed to meet the December 2009 registration deadline which was announced last year by its head, Dr Winsome Gordon.
"We have not met the deadline, in relation to registration, due in part to technical difficulties with the online registration," Thompson said.
The Sunday Gleaner understands that the online system crashed and the council is in the process of issuing a request for proposal in a bid to purchase a system that works.
Sharon Reid, principal of St Andrew High School and president of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS), was not aware that the teaching council's online system had crashed.
"That really would be something else," Reid said, while expressing hope that the ministry would be able to recover the information that was entered into the failed system.
Reid told our news team that most of the teachers at St Andrew High registered online last year.
She explained that new members of staff were required to register online, while existing faculty members had to register online and submit the relevant documents to the education ministry.
Reid does not think teachers are averse to being registered. "Certainly not at my school," she said.
However, the JAPSS president argued that the "whole process is tedious".
no information-share
Reid said the information and documentation a teacher provides upon employment contains the information that is needed for the registration process but, because of a lack of information-share, the educator must submit the documentation and information all over again.
"Because of that, people just didn't bother, I'm sure."
Reid believes most teachers are cognisant of the fact that being registered is a legal requirement and she does not think the failure to get registered is to be blamed on the teachers.
According to Reid, enforcement is the primary culprit. "If you have a law in place and nothing put in place to (enforce it), what you expect to happen?"
She was supported by Ruel Reid, special advisor to the education minister and principal of Jamaica College.
"If you read the code of regulations, you should not even be a teacher unless you were registered (but) over time the system has broken where we weren't paying particular attention to that because the same documentation that confirms you as a teacher essentially is the same set of documentation that should register you," Ruel Reid said.
He added: "In the absence of technology, everybody knows that the government departments have been very, very inefficient and tardy in terms of maintaining proper files."
According to the Jamaica College principal, it is not a case of teachers being reluctant to get registered.
"I just think you need to put the system in place and make it efficient."
Nadine Molloy, president of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), also bemoaned what she described as the education ministry's inefficiency.
"The ministry needs to accept that it is not always as efficient as all of us would like it to be."
She argued that there are instances when documentation was submitted to the ministry on behalf of a teacher and when checks were made, the ministry did not have any record of it.
"So I do not know that you can entirely say that it is the teacher's fault why the teacher is not registered. The bottom line is, the ministry must accept culpability where they are culpable," argued Molloy.