Desperate shortage

of qualified church teachers in P-NG

From SUSAN YOUNG, in Port Moresby

The Anglican Bishop of

Papua-New Guinea has sharply

criticised the Australian “mother church” for failing to supply the

territory church’s only boys’ high

school with enough qualified

teachers.

In a special statement, Bishop David Hand said that unless the staffing situation soon improved dramatically, the Anglican church in Papua-New Guinea might be forced to close the Martyrs’ School, near Popondetta, in the Northern District of Papua. The present staff is 15, six unqualified, for just over 330 boys.

“Martyrs’ School is the only boys’ secondary school run by the Anglican church in the territory,” said Bishop Hand. “Yet the Australian church is apparently incapable of keeping it adequately staffed. It’s pathetic and disgraceful.

“The Australian Board of Mis sions has done its best to find us the teachers, but the Australian church people themselves just aren’t responding.

“It’s amazing that there are not in the Australian church enough trained men teachers with sufficient sense of dedication and vocation, or mere sense of adventure, to ccme up here and help these people who will soon have to be running their own country.

“Every year we have the same trouble. We scratch around and make frantic appeals for staff and somehow manage to make do. Then at the end of the year most of them leave and we are back to square one.”

Bishop Hand said that so far the church had kept the school’s staff up to strength by employing a lot of unqualified volunteers. “However”, he went on, “with the new system of education now being introduced here, unqualified staff are no longer acceptable.

“This means that Martyrs’ School is now in an extremely critical situation and unless we can very soon find more fully trained teachers we shall have to give serious consideration to closing the school.”