Education Minister, Premila Kumar

Education Minister, Premila Kumar says she doesn’t understand why unions and Opposition parliamentarians are against teachers upgrading their qualifications.

Kumar says the education sector keeps changing like any other professional field and the government is strongly advocating that teachers need to upgrade their qualifications.

“In fact, Fiji Teachers Union and Fijian Teachers Association were disappointed when we encouraged teachers to upgrade their qualifications, and of course, SODELPA and NFP quickly joined the bandwagon to criticize the Ministry.”

Kumar says the Ministry is committed to improving the quality of learning and teaching and upgrading the salaries of teachers.

“I fail to understand why unions do not want their members to get salary upgrades. And I’d like to inform everyone that there are teachers who will be getting salary upgrades by $8000 – and that’s a substantial amount for a year.”

A total of 12, 872 teaching staff are employed by the Ministry.

Of these 478 have a Master’s Degree, 1107 teachers have Post Graduate level qualification, 5 105 teachers have Degree, 4304 teachers have Diploma, and 1878 teachers have Certificates.

The Ministry says out of the 600 teachers who upgraded their qualification, they have already paid out 270 and the remaining 364 will receive their payment within the next two weeks.

In the current Financial Year the Ministry was allocated $911, 000 to upgrade salaries of 279 teachers, which Kumar says have already been done.

She adds in the revised budget the Ministry received a further $1.7m to upgrade the salaries of the remaining 347 teachers.

Kumar also says 230 teachers from remote and rural areas have upgraded their qualification which gives Fijians the reassurance that the government is increasing the number of qualified teachers.