Education Ministry placing 2300 new trained teachers in schools – Manickchand

Education Minister Priya Manickchand has disclosed that the uphill task is now looming to place 2300 newly-trained teachers into the school system, but consolidated data is still lacking to determine where these skills are needed.
In what she described as a ‘teething’ issue on Monday, the Education Minister highlighted that the new teachers will soon graduate from the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE). However, there is no centralised data on where vacancies exist or what specialties are required.

“We are about to graduate 2300-plus teachers into the system. Where do we place those teachers? Where are the vacancies? Where are the specialties needed? Is there a central place at this point that has that information and I would wager no,” Manickchand noted.
The Minister made this revelation just as the new Education Management Information System (EMIS) was launched – a software, which, if used correctly, can provide this data to the Ministry in the future.
Meanwhile, she reassured that Government is continuing with its robust buildout of the sector through the construction of new schools, adequate textbooks, cash grants for students and schools, breakfast for learners and many other programmes.
“Right now, six brand new secondary schools are being constructed in the country. Breakfast is being provided for all Grade Six students for the first time. All of our teachers are going to be trained for the first time in our history.”
Most importantly will be the achievement of 100 per cent trained teachers by 2025. When the CPCE operations were brought fully online during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a surge of 2500 new students within the first year. Manickchand had projected that in the coming years, this would be advantageous to Guyana when other countries are recording lower numbers.
CPCE offers a wide variety of courses and programmes for every level of teaching, including early childhood programme for both pre-service and in-service students, the primary programme and the secondary academic and pre-vocational programmes. In total, there are four programmes for the Associate Degree in Education (ADE) along with a Trained Teacher Certificate (TTC) programme for in-service teachers who are not eligible for the ADE programme.
This year, for the first time in education history, CPCE students who are training in the system earned an in-service salary as of January. (G12)