| Fix education mess, donors tell government | Send to a friend |
| Tuesday, 01 November 2011 23:08 |
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The Citizen Reporter Dar es Salaam. Development partners (DPs) yesterday expressed concern over poor performance in primary and secondary education in the country, calling for concerted efforts to reverse the trend.They are convinced that it will not be possible to ensure quality education at higher levels unless there is a strong foundation on which to build. The worries were expressed by the Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania, Mr Robert Orr, during a joint education sector review working session in Dar es Salaam. In order to improve the standard of education, they suggested the need to provide handsome incentive packages to teachers and provide schools with enough books and laboratories. Mr Orr said while the group recognised the actions taken by the government to respond to challenges facing the sector, but a lot more needed to be done to improve the standard of education including performance in national examinations. According to Mr Orr, from the perspective of the Education Development Partners’ Group (ED-DPG), the biggest challenge facing Tanzania’s education sector today is the ensurance of high quality education at all levels. The partners include Canada, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America as well as African Development Bank, Unesco, Unicef, the World Bank and the World Food Programme. Canada is the current chair of the ED-DPG. In 2010/11, the members of the ED-DPG contributed more than Sh279 billion to education sector in Tanzania. The biggest portion of the funding, approximately Sh250 billion was earmarked to support education in Tanzania Mainland. The total support was equivalent to a bout 12 per cent of the government’s education sector budget for 2010/2011. According to the High Commissioner, at primary level, the proportion of pupils passing the final examination has hovered around 50 per cent for the past four years while at secondary level the proportion of students passing Form Four examinations has dropped from 90 per cent in 2007 to 50 per cent in 2010. “It is not sufficient to simply allocate teachers and textbooks to schools. We must ensure that teachers are actually in the classrooms and are motivated,” he said, adding that the downward trend is, to some extent, attributed to lack of motivation on teachers. He observed that the government should ensure that teachers were equipped with the needed resources and support including opportunities for in-service training, which would enable them to carry out their responsibilities to the best of their abilities. Mr Orr noted that the downward trend could also be the result of school environment not being friendly enough to encourage efficient teaching. The High Commissioner said: “The DPs are eager to learn more about the findings of the rapid assessment carried out by the government to establish the causes of widespread failures across the country in the 2010 Form Four examination”. The diplomat advised that Tanzania’s latent growth potential emphasizes the importance of ensuring that the technical and vocational curricula was relevant to labour market requirements. When opening the annual workshop, the permanent secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, Mr Penniel Lyimo, admitted that the government was facing a lot of challenges in its endeavour to improve education sector. Key challenges, he said, include provision of enabling learning environment, shortage of teachers and equipment, and on the overall, improving the quality of education. Increased demand for provision of loans to the needy students in higher education learning institutions, availability of adequate and qualified human resources as well as adequate user friendly infrastructural facilities at all levels of education also remain obstacles. Mr Lyimo also pointed out that the increase in requirement of teaching and learning of science and technology to develop human capital for sound economic development was also a problem He noted that measures were underway to alleviate the problems, saying: “Statistics confirm that Tanzania will achieve education related millennium development goals.” He said the enrolment in pre-primary education increased to 1,069,208 pupils of whom 538,478 are boys and 530,730 are girls compared to 925,465 pupils enrolled in 2010, being an increase of 15.5 per cent. For primary education, he noted the enrollment was 8,143,175 in 2011 compared to 7,653,502 in 2010, an increase of 6.4 per cent. According to the PS, in 2010/2011, higher education enrollment in universities and university colleges increased to 139,630 from 118,951 in 2009/10 as technical education enrollment increased from 57,286 in 2009/10 to 85,040 in 2010/11. But the Tanzania Education Network Coordinator, Ms Helima Nengele, took issues with the rate of failure at the government teacher’s training colleges, saying it was alarming and contribute a lot to the poor quality of education. She said the National Examination Council of Tanzania records show increasing rate of failures in the final examination. She alleged that at least 4.8 per cent of diploma teachers failed the exams in 2010 compared to 1.6 per cent in 2009. About 4.8 per cent of Grade A teachers failed the exams in 2010 compared to 2.9 per cent in 2009. “How can we improve quality of education at other levels while our colleges are producing incompetent teachers?” she Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
