MoESD addresses accommodation woes
Baboki Kayawe | Monday June 8, 2015 15:31
Speaking during the national teachers day celebrations at Molepolole Sports Complex on Friday, the Minister of Education and Skills Development (MoESD) Unity Dow stated that currently there are 16,000 houses for both primary and secondary school teachers, translating into 60 percent of the over 26,000 teachers.
“This leaves us with a shortfall of over 9,000 houses for teachers,” she said.
Dow said they continue to make efforts to address this housing shortfall as evidenced by the purchase of 547 houses from Botswana Housing Corporation between 2011/12 and 2013/2014.
Moreover, to strengthen teaching and learning, the school inspections have been resuscitated, she said. This is in addition to improving the supply of teaching and learning material as the national audit on these materials has showed an imbalance in supply of textbooks and other learning and teaching material across all levels.
“Consequently, we embarked on procurement and redistribution of textbooks to ensure adequate availability thereof. Furthermore, as part of our efforts to improve the teaching and learning environment currently two new junior schools at Maun and Francistown, and two unified schools at Tsabong and Takatokwane are being constructed,” said Dow.
She added that over 300 teachers were expected to resume duty this year after undergoing an upgrading from diploma to degree level.
A teacher union representative, Sam Malete told the gathering that lack of proper consultation by MoESD continued to create undue animosity between their organisations and the ministry.
He added that in most instances good policies bound to transform the education sector were designed and even implemented without consulting teachers and unions.
“It is usually difficult to own up something that you were not adequately consulted on. The MoESD has absurd and habitual tendencies of failing to make proper consultations when making major reforms in education,” Malete said.
He mentioned the introduction of overtime allowance, hours of work, leave and size of class increases as some of the good policies not filtered down properly due to lack of consultation.
A total 83 teachers were awarded medals in recognition of long and distinguished service, meritorious service and silver jubilee service. The day was held under the theme, ‘Teacher: A Change Agent for Global Competitive Human Resource and Economic Diversification.’