LUSAKA, Oct. 5 (Xinhua) -- Teachers in Zambia on Friday joined the rest of the world in commemorating the World Teachers' Day with a union expressing concern that the low teacher/pupil ratio was affecting the delivery of quality education.
Jeffrey Simuntala, secretary-general of the Basic Education Teachers' Union of Zambia (BETUZ), said the government needs to employ at least 10,000 new teachers in order to improve on the teacher/pupil ratio especially in rural areas, according to state-run news agency, the Zambia News and Information Service.
In remarks delivered in the northern town of Chinsali during the celebrations, the trade union official said the 2,000 new teachers that the government plans to employ this year was insufficient as staffing levels in most of the schools in the country had remained low.
This year's commemoration has been held under the theme "The Right to Education Means the Right to Qualified Teachers".
Recently, Zambian President Edgar Lungu revealed that the government intends to employ about 55,000 teachers in the next 10 years.
Meanwhile, the Teaching Council of Zambia (TCZ), a government agency that regulates the teaching profession, said it has asked all training institutions to ensure that only students with proper senior secondary school grades were enrolled to be trained as teachers.
Effie Sinkala, a senior technical officer at the organization said all colleges and universities have been instructed to ensure that only those with requisite qualifications were enrolled to train as teachers in order to improve the quality of teaching.
She further said the organization has made milestones in its bid to register teachers, with a total of 234,374 registered so far while 100,036 teacher registration certificates have been issued.
The government has instituted the teacher registration exercise in order to flush out bogus teachers and ensure that only those with proper qualifications remain in the profession.
