Transcript
GENEVIEVE NELSON - Well about 12 months ago now, my NGO discovered that there was a large cohort of partially trained elementary teachers right across Papua New Guinea. They had begun their training at some stage over the past two decades, but they weren't given the opportunity to complete and so when we found out about the education and particularly elementary education is something that we're very, very passionate about and we wanted to respond and do something about it, so we entered into a partnership with the Papua New Guinean National Department of Education and the PNG Education Institute and since that time, we've been taking what we call our Teach for Tomorrow training, right across Papua New Guinea and finishing off the training of these partially trained elementary teachers and yesterday we kicked off the training programme in Manus province.
SELA JANE HOPGOOD - So what were some of the reasons that have caused a barrier for these partially trained teachers?
GN - Yeah look there's been a large backlog. About 12 months ago when we first discovered the problem, there were seven and a half thousand teachers right across PNG who were affected by this and these teachers have actually been working in and volunteering to run local schools often in very, very remote areas, but until they have the opportunity to complete their studies, they were able to be transferred to the government payroll and paid what they should be paid in order to do the extraordinary work. The reason that PNG was in this situation is varied. There was issues with budgets not being transferred down to the provinces to enable provinces to complete the training and unfortunately after a couple of decades, we ended up with this very large backlog of these partially trained teachers.
SJH - What will this programme cover?
GN - Yeah so it's a six week very, very intensive programme as I'm sure you can imagine. We bring all the trainee teachers together to the one site and we host them there over a six week period and we send our trainers in and the trainers are a combination of provincial government trainers from the Manus department of education, national trainers from the PNG education institute and then KTF (Kokoda Track Foundation) trainers from our NGO and they do in and they cover a wide range of topics that elementary teachers need to be the best teachers that they could possibly be. They cover literacy and phonics, maths and science, child behaviour, teaching methods, assessment and evaluation and reporting, inclusive education, gender equality. A real wide range of topics get covered across the six weeks.
SJH - Do you plan to take this programme all over Papua New Guinea?
GN - Yeah that's our plan. We want to take it to every province where there are this cohort of partially trained teachers. To date we've trained 1,200 elementary teachers over the past 12 months and we've already taken the program to Oro, Gulf, Milne Bay, Morobe provinces and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. We've kicked off this week in Manus and next on our horizon is New Ireland province. There's about 10 provinces left to go with these partially trained teachers and us as an NGO were committed to finishing off the entire country.
SJH - This will help tackle the issue of PNG rural communities having a shortage of teachers on hand...
GN - The elementary teachers are the back bone of the rural education system right across PNG. There needs to be an elementary school based in every village that's not in reasonable walking distance to another village with a school and for anyone who knows anything about Papua New Guinea and its geographical remoteness in the terrain, we need a lot of these schools and therefore we need a lot of these teachers and elementary teachers focus on those really vital early years of learning. Some of the most important schooling years for a child and so we're just so passionate about Teach for Tomorrow and trying to get as many of these high quality professionally trained teachers out into the remote regions as possible.
