More than 200 new teachers will join the education system this year.
Ministry of Education deputy secretary Mr Josefa Sania said 167 teachers were retired last year.
The ministry will not only be replacing retired teachers but also those who have migrated.
“These teachers will be replaced by graduates from tertiary institutions like the Fiji National University, formerly known as the LTC and Fiji College of Advanced Education. We have enough graduates from these institutions,” Mr Sania said.
“Not only are we looking at replacing teachers that have retired but also a big number of teachers have resigned to move abroad. These are teachers in both primary and secondary sections.”
“We will not only be replacing 167 teachers but we’ll look at replacing about 200 plus to 240 teachers because of the numbers that have resigned and the numbers that will be going for in-service training or teachers who have changed occupation, for example, changed ministries. That is the replacement that we are going to use this year.”
Mr Sania said there was a total of 8000 teachers in the country.
“Out of these 8000, close to 5000 teachers were for the primary and the remaining for secondary schools,” Mr Sania said.
He said they would recruit graduates for primary teachers from FNU (LTC).
“However, for secondary teachers, we are working on the 2008 and 2009 graduates who are still waiting out there. We’ll try to get them into the secondary system to replace those who are exiting the system and then we’ll look for others from the 2010 graduates of FCAE and USP. Particularly, those with teacher trained qualifications,” Mr Sania said.
Compared to recent years, the pupil-teacher ratio in Fiji has decreased and now stands at about 20.
“The recent statistics we had, we were looking at about 19 or 20. The student teacher ratio has gone down. That is overall. However, practically, that is not right because most of the schools located in the rural and very remote areas do not have enough children inside the classroom,” the deputy secretary said.
“Some of them have 10 students or eleven students inside the classroom or even the total roll in a school does not exceed 50 or 80.” “ It’s very small whereas in the urban areas, the teacher-student ratio is high.”
“In some urban schools, for example in Suva and Lautoka, the number of students is 45 to 50 students. We do not have any standard teacher-student ratio,” Mr Sania said.
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