THE Government will recruit 12,854 graduates to the teacher service to quell the prevailing teacher service on the directive of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, said State Revenue and Finance Minister Ranjith Siyambalapitiya.
The Minister was addressing the media at the Ministry recently.
Over two thousand graduates who have undergone training under the Tharuna Aruna third programme will receive teaching appointments by January 01 next year.
In addition, 10,766 graduates will be posted to National and Provincial Schools as teachers. 1,507 graduates will be appointed to National Schools while 9,259 graduates will be posted to Provincial Schools.
The Minster said the prevailing teacher shortage in rural and under privileged schools could be solved when this proposed teacher recruitment programme is implemented.
The Minister said the President looked into this issue from a humanitarian perspective. That is why he has suggested to offer 10,000 jobs for graduates at the last budget.
Some politically motivated elements are trying to score over this matter by creating problems for the people when the Government has taken steps to solve this issue, the Minister said.
By Dharma Sri ABEYRATNE
1 Comment
Amal Siriwardena
This recruitment is supposed to be due to ‘prevailing teacher shortage in rural and under privileged schools.’ Well, certainly there are schools which are short of teachers. But let us look at the overall position. The state system has 200,000 teachers for 4.3 million students ( someone please correct my figures if I am wrong). An overall ratio of 1:21. A very high ration of teachers indeed, by any reasonable standards! I doubt whether even the elite private schools have Such a good ratio,
The problem, as came out in the education forum meeting yesterday, is with the allocation. While we have some schools chronically short of students, others are having heavy over staffing not to mention,ridiculous situations like schools with four teachers and five students.
On the other hand, is the main purpose is to give employment to unemployed graduates? By the way, I believe the original objective of Tharuna Aruna was to train graduates for the Private Sector- have they given up on this? If graduates cannot be employed in the commercial sector for whatever reason, and we have to find some employment for them in the state sector to avoid future insurrections, well this is another matter. The cost of employing them being less than the cost of insurrections, it may even be justifiable ! But we have to keep in mind that the cost of this will keep on mounting and it is not sustainable in the long run.