The teacher placement exercise that saw top officials at Rwanda Education Board (REB) suspended from their duties, will come to an end on Monday, November 16, The New Times has learnt. On November 2, REB’s Director-General Irénée Ndayambaje, Deputy Director-General Angelique Tumusiime and the Head of Teacher Development and Management Department, James Ngoga, were suspended by the Prime Minister for failure to co-ordinate the teachers’ recruitment process. The Government is in the process of recruiting at least 7,214 new professional teachers in the 2020 academic year in order to improve the teacher-to-student ratio and cater for the new classrooms being constructed to decongest existing ones. Under the recruitment plan, the government was looking for 3,799 primary school teachers, 3,415 secondary school teachers and an additional 386 teachers for TVET schools. Process continues Immediately after the suspensions, the Minister of Education Valentine Uwamariya announced that a special committee had promptly been set up to ensure continuity of the teacher placement process. “The suspensions are definitely not going to stop the process. Our work continues. As we speak, there is a committee in place to ensure that the teachers are placed as planned and we expect this process to be over this week,” she said. Way forward Speaking to The New Times, the Officer in Charge of Information in the Ministry of Education, Flavia Salafina, said that the process is complex and will be explained in detail on Monday when the final list of teacher placements will be announced. “The placement process is very complex because you are literally moving teachers around, from one place to another across the whole country. What I can tell you is that the final placement list will be published on Monday. It is then that we will give you the full details,” she said. The challenges As schools started reopening on November 2, concerns emerged that teachers who had successfully passed their entry exams were yet to be placed in their respective schools and had been stranded for more than three months. They were meant to be placed in different public schools across different districts. Also revealed was the issue of teachers who passed their interviews last year in December but had not been placed yet, almost a year later. One of the teachers who passed the exams last year said that there were discrepancies in the tabulation of data recorded between the districts and REB. He gave an example of Nyabihu District, where he is currently based. “In Nyabihu, the district officials know that there are existing vacancies for teachers, but the data released by REB indicates there are no vacant positions,” he said, preferring to remain anonymous to be able to speak freely. According to the teacher, the district now has three teachers who are on the waiting list for administrative positions. “There is a general problem of teachers who passed exams for administrative positions. We passed but have not been placed anywhere yet. I don’t know whether these teachers who are being recruited will go to schools that don’t have administrators,” he wondered. According to a headteacher who only preferred to be identified with one name, Rutabana, the current teacher placement process has a number of challenges as opposed to the one before. “Five years ago, we (headteachers) used institutions to compete for the best teachers. At that time, a head teacher would be satisfied by his staff,” said Rutabana, whose school is located in Gisagara District. Rutabana who has been a teacher for the past 10 years decried that the current process does not give room for a headteacher to choose for themselves the teachers they feel would best serve the purpose. “You can imagine receiving teachers that you are not in need of, and then you don’t get the ones that you actually want,” he added. According to Rutabana, even though the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted operation of schools, “The truth is that there were unnecessary delays but this can be reverted for a better solution”. “I think much as REB sets the exams, the recruitment process should be taken over by the districts, which should then engage schools,” he said, adding that what REB does is costly and tiresome. Current numbers Under the Rwanda Quality Basic Education Project, the ministry of education was planning to spend $126 million on the construction of 11,004 classrooms and 16,680 latrines to reduce overcrowding, a move that will require more teachers. Currently, in primary schools, one teacher caters to 59 students in primary school while it is one teacher per 26 students in secondary schools, according to figures from the ministry of education. There are currently 2,479,366 students in primary school and 636,162 students in secondary schools.
