DR Angel Gavrielatos, campaign manager for Education International’s new campaign to mobilise funding for public education, says with a general election looming the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) should hold Government’s feet to the fire to extract the policies needed to retain educators.

“As I understand it, later this year there is going to be a national election, and that gets me very excited in terms of campaign building and what can and should be done by the union in the context of an election to extract the necessary commitments to address the underlying issues,” Gavrielatos told a weekend forum hosted and organised by the JTA on Friday.

Charging that, “the teacher exodus is now more serious than it’s ever been”, Gavrielatos said the last available public data in 2003 show that more than 500 Jamaican teachers were lured to the United Kingdom; and in the United States 791, “so your teacher shortage is impacted not only because of domestic factors, but extraterritorial global factors, making it even more difficult to handle and manage in making a global approach to the teacher shortage”.

“The cause of the teacher shortage is well documented. It’s being driven and fuelled by an underinvestment in education which now sees that there are teachers around the world being overworked, underpaid and undervalued,“ he said.

Insisting that the failure of governments to craft policies over the past 40 years, and their unwillingness to heed well-meaning warnings, have “brought us to this point”, Gavrielatos said, “I’ve been around for a long time [and] I’m sad that, yet again, we have reached the ‘I told you so’ moment. I get no joy out of telling politicians, ‘We told you so.’ I would much prefer being proven wrong.

“We told them 40 years ago, ‘If you continue down the path of cutting budgets, if you continue down the path of austerity, if you continue down the path of denigrating this noble profession, will there not be consequences?’ Here we are. Well, we told you so, and we are telling you again: ‘Put in place the policy settings necessary to attract and retain the teachers we need,’ ” he said.

Gavrielatos, in pointing out that in most countries around the world the teacher salaries bill is about 75 per cent of the total education budget, said the solution is simple.

“If you want to address the teacher shortage problem, if you want to ensure that we get the teachers we need and the teachers that the students deserve, there are three simple ingredients: competitive professional salaries, decent working conditions, and job security. It is not rocket science. That requires money, and that’s why we say invest in teachers and invest in education.”

He added: “The exodus is more serious than it’s ever been. For example, in many countries we now face a situation where resignation rates are greater than retirement rates. More people are resigning than are retiring — they are leaving early. Now this brings with it other complications, because even if governments want to plan, to engage in sophisticated workforce planning – and I put it to you, they are not doing the workforce planning that needs to be done — it’s hard to do so when people are resigning at a higher rate than retiring.”

Said the Education International campaign manager, “when people aren’t resigning, governments can plan. They know when people will retire, you can plan for that; you can have the discussions with teacher colleges and universities and say, ‘In four years’ time the retirement rate is going to be this high so we need so many [teachers].’ They can’t do that when resignation rates are so high.

“But there’s another problem, they are losing them in their early years of teaching, in their first five years of teaching — they are not hanging around. Gone are the days of the veteran teacher who gave 30/35 years plus service. Gone are those days.”

In the meantime, he said added pressure is being placed on the teachers who remain in the system as fewer of the younger population are going into teacher education as a career of choice.

“From my home state in Australia there has been a 30 per cent reduction in the number of people going into teacher education. But it gets even worse — of that 30 per cent, fewer are going into teacher education, only 50 per cent are graduating, so we are only getting half of the two thirds that are going into teacher education. Why? They go to do their practicum and when they see what they see, they say we are out of here,” Gavrielatos stated.

“As a result of the teacher shortage it’s putting added pressure on the teachers that remain — contributing to a downward spiral — but worst still, it’s denying learners their right to learn, which denies them their future.”

Go Public! Fund Education is Education International’s new campaign to mobilise funding for public education around the world.

“Go Public! Fund Education will support education union campaigns to build well-resourced, equitable, public education systems that value and invest in teachers,” Gavrielatos said.

“Education International will ensure that every learner, no matter where they are located, every child, regardless of circumstances, has a right to be taught by a qualified teacher every day, every lesson. That’s what’s driving us, and therefore we must organise at the local level, the national level, the global level in order to ensure and hold all governments to account to ensure that they deliver on what’s necessary, and that is the greater investment in education — by definition, greater investment in teachers,” Gavrielatos told the forum.