In a report, titled ‘Impact of public wage bill cap on teachers’, Actionaid discovers that in order for the country to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) urgent efforts needed to be paid to teachers.
The report reveals that Sierra Leone in its vision 2025 emphasises that education is key for a nation’s sustainable development, and that it further stresses that, “there is urgent need to pay serious attention to the resource needs of the education sector, including issues of trained, qualified and well-equipped and motivated teachers. But the Wag and Caps and teachers’ ceiling are at variance with the vision. “
The Education Act of 2004, the report adds, incorporates the national perception of education as it “focuses on maximizing access to education, provision of basic school materials for all schools and minimizing the possibility of cost being a barrier to accessing education through free primary education for all children and ultimately free and compulsory basic education.”
The educational sector has however made some progress with the free primary school, paying of subsidies for public exams, but success could have been more achieved with the universal primary education only if there are enough trained and qualified teachers, it maintains.
It is revealed also in the report by the Education Sector Plan (EPA) that there is frequent gap of funding for the nine years and this stands at Le717, 798 million.
“This gap is indicative of need to priorities the alternatives at the expense of so many donors,” it notes.
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