Trials of being a teacher in Fiji

From a Suva correspondent

How are you going to educate Fiji’s mass of children if there are no teachers to do it? And how are you going to get teachers if the pay is far too low to be acceptable?

Teachers in Fiji are getting pretty fed up with their low pay. They can’t decide, they say bitterly, whether the teacher is Fiji’s worst paid profes sional or best paid skilled worker.

According to a report on teachers’ grievances compiled by a committee of the Fijian Teachers’ Association, which held its annual conference in May, low rates of pay were one of the main reasons for a “great exodus” of school teachers from their pro fession.

Unless teachers were given an economic boost, the committee felt, Fiji’s education crisis would be aggravated even more by an in creased teacher shortage.

Figures from a Suva employment agency showed that at this time last

year 17.02 per cent, of the people who registered with the agency want ing clerical positions were teachers.

It seemed that none of them had complained so much about the job as the lack of pay.

The report of the grievance com mittee said there was also a relatively timid response from school leavers interested in taking up teaching.

They preferred to hunt around for better paid jobs, falling back on teaching only as a last resort.

The social status of the teacher was on the decline. Respectability, social, mobility, quality and pay were closely inter-related.

Fijian teachers, too, are angry about what they call non-recognition of in-service teacher training.

They claim that when teachers return from overseas after success fully completing courses, their newly attained knowledge is frequently not recognised in any way.

The report cites the case of a very able teacher who successfully com pleted a Diploma of the Teaching of

English at the University of Sydney.

He did not receive monetary or any other kind of recognition for his specialised training.

“When he asked the Education Department whether he would receive any salary increase he got the terse and bombastic reply that the depart ment felt in his case ‘no change in grading or salary is warranted’,” the report said.

In the school to which he was posted he was still required to teach many subjects other than his specialty, English.

The teacher was disillusioned, the report went on, and resigned in dis gust. He was now doing extremely well in another profession.

The report claimed that sending students overseas, especially to Britain, for a few months, was ex pensive and only produced pseudo specialisation.

It was preferable to send away younger students to do full three or four-year university courses than others on numerous half-year or one year courses.