‘Hire local grads, not teachers from India’

Putrajaya’s plan to recruit English teachers from India is impractical as Malaysia has an abundance of unemployed Bachelor of Education graduates, says PKR.

PETALING JAYA: The government must scrap its plan to hire English teachers from India as it will only worsen the high unemployment rate among Bachelor of Education (B. Ed) graduates, said PKR today.

The plan, announced by Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak last week drew opposition from educators, education reform group the Parent Action Group for Education (PAGE) as well as the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP).

While other critics cried foul over the fact that the proposal meant hiring non-native English speakers, PKR communications director Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad zeroed in on how Malaysia had an abundance of untapped B. Ed students.

“You can actually never have enough teachers in Malaysia. Right now, some 20,000 B. Ed graduates from private universities are being discriminated and not offered placements in government schools,” he said, citing unofficial figures from Gabungan Graduan ISMP Malaysia (GGIM).

“We are facing a crisis that remains unsolved and now all of a sudden the prime minister announces he wants to recruit teachers from India. This will only make the situation more serious than it already is,” he told reporters at a press conference here.

In March this year, Deputy Education Minister Puad Zarkashi confirmed that 7,000 B. Ed graduates were still not being offered placements.

According to Nik Nazmi, the government was fielding offer letters for teaching positions exclusively to public university graduates in an attempt to help them.

But this was at the expense of B. Ed graduates from private universities, irrespective of their academic results, he said.

Meanwhile, 74 English Teaching Assistants from the United States were already being stationed at selected schools nationwide, under the Fullbright English Teacher Assistantship programme jointly administered by the Malaysian-American Commission on Educational Exchange and the Ministry of Education.

‘Unemployed B. Ed graduates desperate’

Nik Nazmi described the B. Ed graduates as being in a desperate situation, as they were burdened by steeper National Higher Education Fund Cooperation (PTPTN) loans to repay compared to public university graduates, and unable to find jobs outside of national schools.

“Private schools prefer expatriate or experienced teachers. Non-school employers are reluctant to hire B. Ed graduates as they feel that their qualification is specialised, making them difficult to work outside of their discipline.

“[Employers also feel] that the graduates will leave when they get placements from the Ministry of Education. Many of these graduates end up working as tuition teachers without the stability and certainty of being a teacher in national schools,” he said.

“This is a huge tragedy and, for me, the idea of recruiting teachers from India doesn’t deserve to even come up,” he added.

According to Nik Nazmi, the problem was just a matter of policy that must be solved before even considering outsourcing teachers from India.

“In another example of the perverse BN education policy, private universities continue to offer B. Ed programmes that will add more unemployed graduates to the statistics,” he added.

He also revealed that even Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) graduates sponsored by the Ministry of Education had complained last year of not being provided placements after six months of waiting.

“The government should consider employing capable B. Ed graduates to add more teachers in national schools, thus lowering the student-teacher ratio.

“At the very least, the government should not discriminate between public and private B. Ed graduates and allow for an open system where capable candidates regardless of which institution they come from to be hired as teachers,” he said.

Job discrimination

In a related development, Haziq Abdul Aziz from Mahasiswa Keadilan said the group would be submitting a memorandum regarding the discrimination to the Ministry of Education soon.

“The problem we face is not that of syllabus or talents It’s just that the policy discriminates them and they are not given a chance to apply,” he told the press conference.

“If they were given the opportunity to apply, then at least there would be competition. But they are not, and if you look at the government web portal, you can see for yourself there is no place for them to apply for a job,” he said.