Policy and teachers

In this video, you’re going to hear teachers talking about national policy in their countries and how it affects them. Whose view is most similar to the policy in your context? How does national policy affect you as a teacher?

Till 2010, we didn’t have– Bangladesh didn’t have any education policy. The first education policy since its birth, 1971, was made in 2010. And it is a very nice education policy. It talks about decreasing the student/teacher ratio, which is about 1 to 70 now. And it says of reducing the ratio to 1 to 30. And it also emphasises on the teacher training, more and more teacher training. It emphasises on the use of communicative language teaching. So that has helped me a lot to think to give a kind of direction how we should work, how we should make the teachers competent, in which areas should we make them competent. So this is very essential for me to be guided.

OK, so three years ago, to be specific, in 2013, there was a change in the national curriculum. At that time, the English in primary school was removed. So yes. So that I didn’t have any class or any teaching hours for teaching English. So I had to teach another subjects. And the English in secondary school, the allocation time in secondary school was also cut down because the government required the students to learn more about our national language, as well as our local language. And then, nowadays, because there have been so many revision and changes, since that the government is not quite ready with the new curriculum, so most of the schools revert to the previous curriculum, which is curriculum 2006.

And in my school, the government policy doesn’t stop the school from introducing English. So the kids are still learning English at school. But the problem is that the teachers are not English educational– they don’t have English educational background. So they are learning English with their homeroom teachers. Yeah.

As far as I remember, we have a national education policy document. It was designed in 1986. And then, I think it was revised in 1992. And it’s a very good piece of document because it focuses a lot on equal opportunity for learners regardless of their background and where they come from. So on paper, I think it’s a very good document because, as I said earlier, it speaks about equal opportunity and quality education for everyone and also quality education for teachers.