Teachers to receive permanent certificates by year-end -President Ali

Trained teachers are set to receive their permanent certificates by the end of this year.

President Dr Irfaan Ali, while addressing teachers on World Teacher’s Day on Wednesday, noted that the backlog goes back to 2016 but this will now be fixed.

“We have implemented a programme, a policy that would have seen one thousand teachers receiving their permanent training certificate. There was a backlog since 2016. I have instructed that by the end of this year, the entire backlog must be cleared,” President Ali said.

The Ministry of Education, in a statement last December noted that it had been “increasingly difficult to use the normal procedure to issue permanent certificates due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rotation system employed by schools, the bureaucracy involved in teachers applying, and then being issued with the certificates.”

These hindrances, the ministry stated, resulted in an “untold number of teachers not being issued with their permanent certificates.”

Education Minister, Priya Manickchand had also given directives to the Chief Education Officer to grant a waiver for the issuance of permanent certificates to all teachers who have completed five years of post-training.

The ministry has also initiated discussions to have the process to attain the trained teacher’s certificate simplified.

Teachers’ training opportunities are improving in Guyana, now with more than 2,500 teachers across the system being granted the chance to pursue higher education at the bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or PhD levels.

The president stated that more than 5,000 teachers had been in training over the last two years, explaining that due to a large number of applications received, the use of technology had to be considered.

To this end, education courses which are offered by the University of Guyana were made available to teachers online.

Additionally, the education sector budget has earmarked over $500 million for the Cyril Potter College of Education to go fully online with its teachers’ training programme in 2022.