More teachers to be recruited for secondary schools

Over the last two years, the recruitment of secondary teachers has been neglected, since the Ministry’s attentions have been focused on primary schools, in the drive to achieve universal primary education by 2015.

Only 1,200 teachers were recruited for secondary schools in the last two years, according to the Ministry spokesperson, Manuel Rego. The result of under-recruitment is an average pupil/teacher ration of 62 to one. Most secondary teachers teach more than one class in more than one school.

There are 140,000 teachers in Mozambican general education, of whom only 20,000 are in secondary education. Rego said the Ministry hopes to reduce the pupil/teacher ratio to 61 or 60 to one “which implies hiring more teachers”. He did not say how many more would be needed.

Money was available in the budget to hire more secondary teachers, he said, since the growth in primary education is beginning to tail off

An inevitable result of the expansion of primary education is that an increasing number of children complete the seven years of primary education, wish to enter secondary school – and find there are not enough places for all of them – even with schools working three shifts a day.

One solution is distance learning for secondary education, introduced on an experimental basis in Nampula province in 2004. Eight years later, there is still considerable skepticism about the quality of education provided through distance learning.

Even when a supposedly full-time teacher is n the same room as the pupil, with all the educational material necessary, the quality of the teaching still leaves much to be desired.

But Rego insists that fears about distance learning are unfounded, and that the Ministry now has greater human and material capacity to run distance learning courses successfully.

“Distance learning can be a good alternative”, he said. “This type of education has not been well received by families – but those pupils who attend distance learning do well in their final exams. They do better than pupils who have been taught through in situ education”.

When distance learning took off in 2004, there were only six centres. Expansion began in 2008, and today there are 89 distance learning centres, catering for about 4,000 pupils.