Ministry of Education introduces Professional Competency Framework |04 May 2023

Ms Jules

The Ministry of Education’s latest continuous professional development session acquaints teachers with the professional competency framework.

Hosted by the teacher management and development technical team, the session took place at the SITE auditorium yesterday.

It was split into three parts, concentrating on two main documents, the Education Amendment Act (2017) and the Teacher Manager and Development Policy, which established the needs to have professional competency standards for teachers.

The technical team’s vice-chairperson, Rosianna Jules, introduced the documents related to the competency standards for teachers and established the links among the documents. She also provided an overview of the competency documents.

“The Education Amendment Act (2017) calls for the need to have standards,” Ms Jules stated. Part 5 Clause 76 (i) calls for the evaluation of standards for teaching and ensuring that proper standards for professional performance are established and maintained. Another within the act calls for the registration of teachers by the teacher’s council. The establishment of the Teacher’s Council is regulated by SI 90 of 2021. All related acts for education can be found on the ministry’s website.

The policy was developed with the technical support of the Ethiopian-based International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA).  The policy framework has been shared with all the schools.

“Our vision is for teaching to become the number one profession,” said Ms Jules, adding that as teachers, they should be doing everything they can to promote the profession.

The mission of the policy is to transform the education landscape for improved teacher and learner performance through established frameworks for the management, recruitment, deployment, development. It is also to retain teachers who are passionate, motivated, trained, and accountable, as well as adaptable.

The purpose of the policy is to create a framework for the standardisation and professionalisation of the teaching profession. It is to provide strategies to strengthen the management and professional of teachers and school governance and professionalise the teaching profession.

“We want to make sure we have standards for these things,” she said.

Ms Jules explained that there are five dimensions, the first being teacher management and professional status, teacher empowerment, school governance, teacher professionalisation and teacher development. Each dimension has a goal, and the total number of goals consists of 17 elements. Rewards and remunerations of teachers will be established horizontally and vertically. This means that the teachers will be able to achieve a reward for staying in the classroom, which someone at the level of management is having.

The policy also addresses award bearing programmes, and for opportunities to be presented to teachers to access the higher tiers of the policy framework.

The chairperson, Alex Souffe, went in-depth on how teachers can be ranked into the higher tiers. There are three documents that have been worked on, including the main one that is the professional competency framework for teachers, the second one being the professional competency handbook and the third being the professional competency handbook for qualified teachers.

To professionalise and standardise teaching, the competency framework introduces levels to which teachers will be assessed on, with 4 being the highest and level 1-2 being the lowest. The handbook provides standards along with indicators to guide and assess the performing teachers. The handbook for qualified teachers is for providing standards and indicators to be used by recognised teacher and education training providers such as SITE during initial teacher education and training.

Level 1 is a skilled teacher, level 2 is a proficient teacher, level 3 is an accomplished teacher, and level 4 is a master teacher.

Yesterday’s session formed part of a series of 71 sessions planned during the April school holidays which involve all teachers, librarians and some School Council members.

Its main aim is to empower teachers and key stakeholders in areas linked to the ministry’s strategic priorities.

Other topics addressed so far include school autonomy, action research, use of IT devices / google classroom, capacity building on how to assess non-examinable programmes, as well as managing school data using Microsoft Excel, among others.

Sunny Esparon

Photos by Louis Toussaint