By Roy Hezron
Women teachers are eager for education as statistics indicates that more women teachers are having higher qualifications as compared to their male counterparts.
The number of female teachers who had Doctorate degree (PhD) in education as per 2019 in our public primary and secondary schools were found to exceed that of men.
For instance as per 2019, we had a total of 5 teachers in our public primary schools having PhD degrees in Education of which 4 teachers were female while only 1 was a male teacher with PhD qualifications, while in public secondary schools we had a total of 4 teachers with PhD qualification of which 3 were female while only 1 was a male teacher.
The Basic Education Statistical Booklet 2019 however shows that public primary schools had more teachers with PhD qualifications.
The trend was the same in Masters and Degree qualifications in public primary schools, as the statistics shows that there were 289 and 9,315 female teachers having Masters and Degree qualifications respectively, while only 187 and 8,576 male teachers having Masters and Degree qualifications respectively; which bring to 476 and 17,891 total number of teachers having Masters and degree qualifications respectively.
At secondary school level, the trend change as there were more male teachers having higher qualifications from Masters, Post Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) and Bachelor degree in education as per 2019.
The statistics shows that a total of 1,916 teachers in secondary school had Masters Qualifications of which 1,023 were male teachers while female were only 893, as only 15 teachers were only found to have PGDE qualifications in secondary schools of which 9 were male and 6 female.
A total of 99,625 teachers in secondary schools had Bachelor Degree in Education as per 2019, of which 59,074 teachers were male while only 40,551 teachers were female.
On the other hand, a total of 24,604 teachers in primary schools have Diploma qualifications of which 13,043 are female and 11,561 are male; while 175,712 teachers had Certificate qualifications formerly P1 certificates of which the government has faced out where 91,419 are female and 84,293 are male teachers.
At Secondary school a total of 3,614 teachers are having Diploma qualifications of which 1,951 teachers were male and 1,663 teachers were female.
The report further indicates that as per 2019, the total number of teachers in public pre-primary schools was 52,780 while primary schools had 218,760 teachers and secondary schools had 105,234 teachers.
When the 100 per cent transition policy was introduced in 2018, it created the need for an additional 27,000 teachers, and currently; the government, through the Teachers Service Commission (TSC), is under pressure to end existing staff shortages, meaning much more money than has been previously budgeted will be required for hiring and training teachers on the CBC approach.
