By Abdou Mbye
The top echelon of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education (MoBSE) held a two-day synergy to discuss national teacher postings, a part of the Ministry’s most central and strategic engagements and decision making process.
Teachers are required to be sysmatically placed to meet the educational needs of every child in the country regardless of their geographical location, social or economic background.
Held at the Regional Educational Directorate in Brikama (region two), from 21st to22nd July 2022, the convergence brought together education officials and actors to scrutinise the teacher-need of the sector and to devise better mechanisms to fill the gap in the rural-urban teacher allocations, address the issue of saturated teachers in some urban schools, placement and utilisation to ensure better education service delivery.
In his opening remarks, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education, Mr Louis Moses Mendy, cited the two-day exercise as an important mandate of the ministry and called for a sober engagement.
“As a sector, we set ourselves to look at new disciplines in our curriculum including the Sciences, TVET, and also factor new changes in our curriculum by reintroducing civics and moral subjects, because we need to do a lot of mindset changing, in order to change the dynamics of our society. We are not only given the responsilbility to impart knowledge in the children but also the responsibility to shape lives,” he posited.
Mr Adama Jimba Jobe , the Deputy Permanent Secreatry, Programmes (DPS), described the meeting as a national call and urged participants to robustly look at national postings through an inclusive perspective and rational decision making.
The Principal Education Officer (PEO) of the Human Resource Directorate at MOBSE, Mr Musa Bah, revealed to the participants that staff placement is key; that it enhances the balancing of regional postings and teacher requirement to ensure fair and equal allocation.
Mr Bah expressed optimism that by Monday, 25 July latest, teachers will access their postings by sending a text message to ‘455’ on Qcell. This he said would mitigate the burden of payment of fares by teachers to check for postings.