HEAD of the Jamaica Teaching Council (JTC) Dr Winsome Gordon has expressed concern that teachers whose licences have been suspended or revoked may move overseas and obtain employment.

To prevent this Dr Gordon is suggesting that the suspended or revoked licence be returned to the JTC.

“The concern we have is that if that physical licence is not returned to the council, then we will need to have a process to identify who are teachers here teaching without the licence or if they use it abroad, because the council has a link to other countries in terms of our accreditation of our teachers, and we don’t want somebody who has been suspended in Jamaica [or] whose licence has been revoked to go into a foreign country and is able to utilise it,” said Dr Gordon.

The matter of whether a teacher should return a licence after suspension or revocation came up as the joint select committee of Parliament reviewing the JTC Bill continued its deliberation on Thursday.

There was some confusion in the sitting as members debated why the committee opted to delete subclause 61 (4) dealing with the return of a licence, which is also dealt with in subclause 49 (3).

Government member of the committee Senator Kavan Gayle questioned if Dr Gordon was presenting new information to the committee and asking for a review and revision of the position that was taken.

Dr Gordon affirmed that they wanted to bring the matter back to the table, because since the previous deliberations, the JTC has established relationships with councils in the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, and the United States — which would impact teachers’ employment.

“We are now a body that has established ourselves as the body that provides teachers with the professional standing to similar bodies in other countries when they go to get employment abroad. So we don’t want to be in a position where we are tracking anybody to find out if they’re using the licence that was suspended or revoked. We would like the licence to be returned…We don’t want to have that responsibility to be tracking somebody whose licence has been suspended or revoked,” she said.

However, Solicitor General Marlene Aldred argued that the bigger issue was that there are two provisions in the proposed legislation basically saying the same thing.

She noted that the committee made a decision to remove it from 61(4) so she was not not clear on the rationale to keep it in 49 (3) if it was already deleted in another clause.

Aldred asked if the committee was now reconsidering the matter and making a decision if the provision should be retained in both places.

“It was an inconsistent decision which needs to be rectified. I don’t know, perhaps someone can go back to the minutes of that meeting to see why the committee took that decision at the time,” said Aldred.

In response, committee chairman, Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams said the matter would be revisited.