Ad­dress the teacher short­age ur­gent­ly. This was the call made by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion dur­ing its Dis­trict Con­ven­tion.

In his ad­dress at the con­ven­tion on Fri­day, the first Vice Pres­i­dent of TTUTA Adesh Dwari­ka called on the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion to swift­ly fill va­can­cies. He ex­plained the short­age had be­gun to af­fect op­er­a­tions at var­i­ous schools around the coun­try.

“In May of 2023, the as­so­ci­a­tion of de­nom­i­na­tion­al boards stat­ed that the short­age of teach­ers is crip­pling op­er­a­tions at the pri­ma­ry schools and warned that if it was not cor­rect­ed, there will be a sig­nif­i­cant de­crease in the first-year in­take in their schools,” said Dwari­ka.

He urged that ac­tion has to be tak­en to en­sure teach­ers are en­cour­aged to stay in the pro­fes­sion.

“More has to be done to at­tract and re­tain tal­ent­ed in­di­vid­u­als in the teach­ing pro­fes­sion. “Rec­om­men­da­tions for this in­clude in­creas­ing teacher salaries, im­prov­ing teacher train­ing and pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment, pro­vid­ing ad­e­quate Teacher Ap­pre­ci­a­tion ac­tiv­i­ties, sup­port and ad­vo­ca­cy for teach­ers and cre­at­ing suit­able and sup­port­ing work­ing en­vi­ron­ments,” he added.

Dwari­ka said schools around the coun­try must have the full com­ple­ment of teach­ers, which he stressed is need­ed for the sake of the coun­try’s ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

“The Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion recog­nis­es the im­por­tance of hav­ing a full com­ple­ment of teach­ers for us to con­tin­ue to pro­vide qual­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion to the na­tion’s chil­dren. We call on the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion to ad­dress the mat­ter of teacher short­ages at our EC­CE, pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools as a mat­ter of ur­gency,” he said.

But so­ci­ol­o­gist Dr Ian Daniel said the is­sue is even more pre­car­i­ous for Trinidad and To­ba­go giv­en the age of the cur­rent crop of teach­ers.

He said al­ready the teacher-to-stu­dent ra­tio stands at one to 18, but in re­al­i­ty, it is ac­tu­al­ly one teacher to 25 stu­dents and in some cas­es one to 40.

“One of the in­ter­est­ing things about the teach­ing pop­u­la­tion, which you can see just look­ing in this room, is that teach­ers are get­ting old, which means that we are go­ing to be fac­ing some years of large-scale re­tire­ment in the teach­ing ser­vice soon. And if that isn’t bal­anced by large skill-in­take, then what we are call­ing the short­age is go­ing to look like a joke in the next few years,” Daniel said.  

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly, who was al­so at the con­ven­tion, ac­knowl­edged the is­sue and ex­plained the min­istry had im­ple­ment­ed strate­gies to bol­ster the num­ber of teach­ers.

“Ear­li­er this year, 200 teach­ers grad­u­at­ed from the 2022/23 teacher in­duc­tion train­ing con­duct­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Com­mon­wealth of Learn­ing. The fo­cus was and re­mains on teacher ef­fec­tive­ness and per­for­mance. That train­ing has been specif­i­cal­ly de­signed to sup­port the growth and pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment of new teach­ers at the EC­CE, pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­el un­der the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.

“May to Ju­ly 2023, the min­istry suc­cess­ful­ly adopt­ed the train­ing of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 400 teach­ers in restora­tive prac­tices and this ini­tia­tive is specif­i­cal­ly aimed at chang­ing the mind­set and par­a­digm of our schools or school cli­mate,” said the min­is­ter.

She al­so ad­mit­ted that some bu­reau­crat­ic con­cerns re­quire fix­ing.

“Through a com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal and tra­di­tion­al strate­gies, tremen­dous ef­fort is be­ing placed on im­prov­ing op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cies as it re­lates to teacher HR func­tions from the up­grade and Iris the on­go­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion of teacher records to the fa­cil­i­ta­tion of mass med­icals to speed up the process for ap­point­ments,” said Gads­by-Dol­ly.