Plans afoot to retrain teachers

March 3, 2013

The Sunday Mail

By Itai Mazire

3 March 2013

The Government will soon retrain more than 100 000 school teachers to align their skills with a proposed new curriculum that seeks to balance academic subjects and vocational skills training.

Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Senator David Coltart told The Sunday Mail last week that his ministry and that of Higher and Tertiary Education are already working to implement the massive teacher retraining programme. He said authorities took the decision after a string of poor public examination pass rates made it necessary for Zimbabwe to also incorporate vocational subjects.

He said about 109 000 tutors were trained under the present curriculum, which is largely biased towards academics.
“Through our preliminary consultations, we observed that the crop of teachers we have needs to be re-trained and also those who are currently at teacher training institutions need to undergo the same process,” he said.

“You will note that after we introduce a new education curriculum in about two years’ time, there is going to be a different syllabus, hence, the need for us to speed up a massive re-training programme.”

Senator Coltart said stakeholders will meet to deliberate on the proposed new education curriculum.

He said a five-member team of experts was already working around the framework of the refined document. “An all stakeholder workshop is already in the pipeline. This will assist us to complete a new curriculum due to our scheduled time-frame.This will also be in line with the Nziramasanga Commission.”

Last month, the Government revealed plans to review the curriculum following strong indications that the country’s education system does not make provision for increased vocational skills training.

The proposed review is in line with  recommendations that were made  by the Nziramasanga Commission set up by Government  in 1999 to evaluate local education strengths and deficiencies. The commission observed that the national curriculum was inclined towards academics and recommended the introduction of vocational skills training in secondary schools.