Govt banks on inspectors to improve education

Government says failure to recruit education inspectors in the past years has heavily affected education standards in the country.

Malawi has been operating with only 32 inspectors against a requirement of 208 inspectors to help evaluate the quality of education and identify shortfalls in the education system.

Speaking yesterday in Mzuzu when opening a workshop for new inspectors, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology Principal Secretary Justin Saidi said the country failed to maintain the required number of inspectors and with time the numbers kept dwindling to 32.

However, he said government has now recruited 201 inspectors who are currently undergoing training.

Said Saidi: “For education to be successful, we need to see the learning outcomes and for that to happen, we need people to go into the field to see if indeed what we are telling our teachers to do is being done the right way.

“That is the more reason government decided to increase the number of inspectors so that these inspectors go out into the schools and make reports. When they give us these reports, we normally make informed decisions because they find the shortfalls that are in schools and we are able to address that.”

On his part, Local Government Accountability and Performance (Lgap) chief of party representative Chikondi Maleta also lamented the low learning outcomes despite that governments injects a lot of money in the education sector.

He emphasised that the money that goes into the education sector should translate into improved education indicators.

Maleta said the newly-appointed head teachers in various local councils have not undergone training and that affects performance of institutions.

“Lgap will help to improve performance of teachers and institutions to ensure that the learning outcomes improve,” he said.

The ministry, with support from Lgap, is training education inspectors to build a cadre of professionals that performs the function of inspecting all primary schools in the country for effective education outcomes.