TSC says no shortage of primary school teachers

The Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (TSC) says there is no short­age of qual­i­fied teach­ers for gov­ern­ment and gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed pri­ma­ry schools in Trinidad.

In a me­dia re­lease, the TSC said valid Pri­or­i­ty Lists cur­rent­ly ex­ist with more than 200 qual­i­fied can­di­dates for Teacher I (Pri­ma­ry) po­si­tions in gov­ern­ment schools, and more than 250 can­di­dates for sim­i­lar posts in gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed pri­ma­ry schools.

Ac­cord­ing to the Com­mis­sion, all of the can­di­dates hold Bach­e­lor of Ed­u­ca­tion de­grees and suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed in­ter­views con­duct­ed by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, mak­ing them el­i­gi­ble for ap­point­ment.

The TSC ex­plained that un­der the es­tab­lished ap­point­ment process for de­nom­i­na­tion­al schools, school boards are grant­ed ac­cess to the Pri­or­i­ty List and are re­spon­si­ble for se­lect­ing and rec­om­mend­ing can­di­dates to fill va­can­cies with­in their schools.

How­ev­er, the Com­mis­sion said many va­can­cies re­main un­filled be­cause the re­quired rec­om­men­da­tions have not been sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion for on­ward trans­mis­sion to the TSC.

The Com­mis­sion al­so re­vealed that it has been work­ing with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion on an­oth­er re­cruit­ment and se­lec­tion ex­er­cise for Teacher I (Pri­ma­ry) po­si­tions in gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed schools.

The ex­er­cise, which is near­ing com­ple­tion, in­volved in­ter­views with more than 400 can­di­dates and is ex­pect­ed to pro­duce an ad­di­tion­al pool of over 300 qual­i­fied teach­ers.

The TSC said its con­sti­tu­tion­al man­date to fill va­can­cies in de­nom­i­na­tion­al board schools de­pends on rec­om­men­da­tions be­ing sub­mit­ted by the boards.

“With­out these rec­om­men­da­tions, ap­point­ments can­not be fi­nal­ized,” the Com­mis­sion said.

The TSC urged de­nom­i­na­tion­al boards and oth­er stake­hold­ers to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with the Com­mis­sion to en­sure va­can­cies in gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed pri­ma­ry schools are filled prompt­ly and ef­fi­cient­ly.

The Com­mis­sion said this col­lab­o­ra­tion would help safe­guard the ed­u­ca­tion­al in­ter­ests of chil­dren and en­sure the pri­ma­ry school cur­ricu­lum is de­liv­ered by trained pro­fes­sion­als.