…includes uniform base salary; $11B for housing; training platform etc
In a continued investment towards improving teachers’ work standards and increasing the opportunities made available to them, President Dr Irfaan Ali announced that the Government is looking to implement a standard minimum salary to eliminate the disparity among teachers.
President Ali made this remark on Thursday during the opening of the Abram Zuil Secondary School in Region Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam).
“We are going to go all across the country to speak to teachers directly. [The Cabinet] is considering now, looking from when we came into office from 2020 to now, to ensure that within this period, all of our teachers are on a standard minimum basic wage to avoid the disparity that exists and we’re going to correct that from 2020 to now as we’re in office,” Ali said.
He further announced that the Government would be approaching the National Assembly for the approval of $11 billion to rehabilitate, retrofit and maintain teachers’ quarters, especially those in the hinterland, to bring them to the “minimum standard”.
“In our next supplementary provision, we are going to go to have a chunk of these resources ready to support this investment of GY$11 billion across the country,” the President added.
In late 2022, the Government had announced salary adjustments for a number of categories of public sector employees, including members of Joint Services and healthcare workers.
Following this, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo in May had shared that the Government was actively working on addressing the adjustment of teachers’ salaries as was done for other public servants.
Last month as well, President Ali had announced plans to deliver a comprehensive package to teachers that included sustainable housing.
“Your lives are not only about salary, it is a comprehensive package that must be able to give you good, sustainable housing and allow you to provide for your children; and for your children, too, to have a great future [with] great opportunities,” Ali had previously said to several teachers.
Training and education
Nevertheless, in addition to salary changes, the President on Thursday also signalled plans to continue training teachers in specialised fields, thus making educational opportunities more accessible to them.
This includes investing in a digitised platform to ensure that all teachers have the chance to become trained right in Essequibo.
“We don’t only want to stop at trained teachers, we want to have trained graduates. So, we’re ensuring that we build a platform to the extent that the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) scholarship programme is not only available to all teachers and students and whoever is coming out of the system, but that it is accessible,” Ali said.
“So, the teachers now have the opportunity to be trained here. That means that our children would have better qualified, more knowledgeable teachers who can deliver in a better way to the children. That would [lead] to better results,” Ali said.
The President noted that this is a “perfect marriage” between physical facilities, institutional reorganisation, and human resource development, which is driving the transformation of the education system and the country’s overall education sector.
Ali added that the Government is also looking to develop a system that pays attention to the incremental educational advancement of teachers and to ensure that they incentivise that development.
“That is another aspect of the equation to support teachers that the Cabinet considered and is working now to ensure we move towards implementation,” the Head of State noted. (Pooja Rambaran)
