MillenniumPost
Bengal

Retd teachers to act as guest faculty till recruitment of new ones

The state education department will allow the state-run schools to engage retired teachers as 
guest faculties for the time being to meet up the problems arising due to shortage of teachers.

Stating that the decision is being taken on “extreme urgency” basis, Partha Chatterjee, the state education minister on Wednesday said this in Assembly in reply to a mention of Congress MLA Nepal Mahato.

Chatterjee said that the examinations to recruit teachers have been completed successfully before March 31, which was the Centre’s dateline. The results are yet to be declared and got delayed due to certain court cases and due to the election procedure.

But in the meantime, till the fresh recruitment of teachers take place, retired teachers can be engaged as visiting faculties. The state has already written twice to the Centre and if needed the principal secretary of the department will go to Delhi next week.

Around 36 lakh examinees had appeared in the examination and they are waiting for the results. 
The governing bodies of respective schools will be taking call on the requirement of visiting faculties. The education department will look into the proposal of respective school authorities and give its decision. Reports from the district inspectors of schools will also be taken. However, there will be no cap in the age limit of the retired teachers for getting selected as a visiting faculty. There should 
not be any problem if a retired teacher is healthy to teach in schools even if he or she is in his 80s.

The state education department is also taking steps to rationalise the teacher-student ratio in each and every school. Explaining the fact, Chatterjee later said that it could be so that there are more teachers in a school compared to that of its requirement while in another school there are more students and less teachers.

Steps will be taken so that the ratio between students and teachers remain same in all schools.
As engaging visiting faculties is not a permanent solution, the state government is in favour of completing the recruitment process of teachers in both primary and secondary level as early as possible.

Many new schools have come up and many were upgraded to secondary and higher secondary level in the past years. There are at present around 70,000 vacancies. Once the recruitment process is complete the problem of shortage of teachers will be solved permanently.

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