Ghana, Philippines interested in sending teachers to Jamaica

Despite a decline in the number of teachers resigning locally, the Education and Youth Ministry is ramping up its efforts to recruit overseas teachers to fill vacant positions in the local public school system.

Permanent Secretary Dr Kasan Troupe, in the ministry, said stakeholders in other countries have expressed interest in providing educators for Jamaica. Troupe, who was speaking at the post-Cabinet press briefing on Wednesday, said the countries had an oversupply of teachers and wanted their educators to have the opportunity to serve in Jamaica. Ghana and the Philippines are among those countries. “We did our research and we found that (from) many of these countries, international organisations and other countries have also recruited from these spaces, so we got some confidence from that with respect to our research,” Troupe said. She added that the ambassadors of both the Philippines and Ghana have met with the Education Ministry to discuss the matter.

A team from Ghana is to be in Jamaica in the week of August 11 to finalise discussions regarding the access of educators from Ghana, according to Troupe.

“What is interesting with this discussion, colleagues, is that they (the teachers) are interested in working for the same emoluments as we offer to our teachers in Jamaica”, she shared. “In some instances, we are getting a number of volunteers who have also expressed some interest in being deployed to assist with our shortage that we have right here in Jamaica, and predominantly our (subject) areas are mathematics and the sciences for this year,” added Troupe.

For this year, too, Troupe said there had been some increase in the number of English language teachers resigning locally. She did not provide statistics relative to those resignations. “But I need to say to the country that we are not seeing the great shift as we saw last year in the number of (teacher) resignations at this time,” Troupe stated.

Meanwhile, she reminded that educators from Cuba continue to fill vacancies in the local sector, as 75 such Cubans are to return for the start of the new academic year on September 2. Additionally, Troupe said some educators from some 15 other countries, including the United States, the Philippines, Nigeria and India, are already deployed across the local education sector.

“Our responsibility as a ministry is to provide options for our principals… We are not forcing, but our schools must have options as they try to make sure their staff members are in place for the new academic year,” Troupe indicated.