The Chronicle
By Leonard Ncube
19 September 2012
THE Government is working on making mandatory that all teachers should have passed Mathematics at Ordinary Level as it moves to improve the standard of education in the country.
However, there is still debate among stakeholders on whether to adopt the suggestion.
Mathematics has always been a requirement for one to enrol in primary school teacher training colleges.
In an interview yesterday, the Minister of  Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, David Coltart, said nothing concrete had been agreed on but his ministry has engaged stakeholders with a view to improve education standards in the country.
This comes in the wake of the economic challenges of the past decade, which saw the education sector losing thousands of qualified teachers.
There have been rumours making rounds that the Government had set benchmarks for all teachers to have Ordinary Level Mathematics by 2014 and those with degrees not related to teaching, but working as teachers have to attain a teaching course.
Minister Coltart could not be drawn into disclosing full details of the key issues being discussed on, but said the engagements were aimed at ensuring that teachers had the best attributes, possession of Mathematics being one of them, to improve education standards.
“I am not aware of any circular to that effect as yet. I will have to find out but what we are doing now is to try and maintain quality education standards among teachers. As the Government we are determined to maintain the education standards that made the country one of the best in the continent and we are currently having discussions with other stakeholders on how best we can improve the quality of education and what could be the pre-requisites,†said Minister Coltart.
He said the debate was on the “kind of teacher Zimbabwe wants†to improve the quality of education.
Minister Coltart said in the last 10 years Government relied on unqualified teachers who learnt through in-house training and there was a need to improve their quality.
“We are being pushed by what happened in the last 10 years where a lot of teachers left the field for greener pastures in the Diaspora or joined other professions. We had to rely on a huge number of unqualified teachers in our schools and now we have to relook into the matter and maintain education standards.
“Instead of building our teachers in colleges we ended up having in-service training of unqualified teachers and now we are trying to improve standards. We have not really come up with what should be the requirements for teachers because there is still debate on whether Mathematics should be a pre-requisite,†said Minister Coltart.
He said the discussions were involving the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, which is responsible for training of teachers.