Iraq education system on brink of collapse

Asia/ Iraq/ 25.02.2020/ Source: www.aljazeera.com.

Millions of students across Iraq are losing out amid a shortage of teachers and education funding, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has said.

Across Iraq, 2.5 million children are in need of education support, including 775,000 internally displaced children residing in and out of camps, the independent humanitarian organisation told Al Jazeera.

According to NRC information shared with Al Jazeera, more than 240,000 Iraqi children were unable to access any form of education in the last year. The United Nations’ humanitarian funding appeals for education in Iraq have also not been met for this year, reaching less than half of the $35m required.

Over recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets to protest against the poor state of public services and corruption. Their demands include more access to jobs and better economic opportunities.

Tom Peyre-Costa, the media coordinator for NRC Iraq, said one way to empower young people would be to provide education and training so that young people would have a better chance of finding work.

«An education system on the brink of collapse can’t effectively address these challenges,» he said.

Teacher shortage

Since the conflict against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) armed group erupted in 2014, no new teachers have been hired, which has led to a 32 percent shortage, according to the NRC. In Nineveh, the second most populated region in Iraq, the number of teachers has plummeted from a prewar level of 40,000 to 25,000.

The aid group said that a lack of teachers has contributed to a high student dropout rate, particularly affecting secondary schools, where 28 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys are not in school. This is compared with primary schools where 9.6 percent of girls and 7.2 percent of boys are out of school.

In addition, a lack of contact time with teachers has hindered the performance of those children who are in school; many schools are now run in a system of two to three shifts a day in order to reduce class sizes, though numbers of students can still reach up to 650 per class.

Nada, a secondary school student in Mosul, said the lack of teachers was shocking.

«Today is my first day in school and I am in shock, we are more than 1,700 students and we don’t have enough teachers,» she told NRC.

Volunteers

With no new teachers hired since the start of the war, volunteers have started to fill the gaps in many areas. In Mosul, which bore the brunt of the war against ISIL, 21,000 volunteers represent almost half of the teachers in the city, the NRC said.

Volunteer teachers are generally subsidised through stipends paid by humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF and NRC, though some, such as those in Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camps in Duhok, north Iraq, receive no such funding.

«The volunteers are typically not trained teachers and are either unpaid, or working on short-term contracts,» Peyre-Costa said.

He told Al Jazeera that since 2015, NGOs and the UN have spent more than $30m paying teachers in Iraq.

But for this current school year, humanitarian agencies said they will cease funding teachers’ salaries, in an attempt to pressure the government to hire and pay qualified teachers.

«Well qualified teachers, who have strong subject knowledge and effective pedagogical skills, are critical for moving from crisis to recovery in Iraq,» Peyre-Costa said.

IDP camps

Children in IDP camps have been hit particularly hard by the shortfall. At an IDP camp in Kirkuk, the Iraqi education ministry pays two teachers for more than 1,700 students enrolled in two primary schools, the NRC said.

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After ISIL, children try to catch up with school in Mosul

In Hamam al-Ali camp, classes for the current school year have not started due to a lack of teachers, leaving some 5,000 children without access to education.

During the war against ISIL, 50 percent of all school buildings in conflict-ridden areas were damaged or destroyed, the majority of which have not been rebuilt, according to the NRC.

«Now we study in prefabs, it’s cold during winter and burning during summer. We are suffering a lot,» Nada, the student, said.

In some governorates across Iraq, announcements have been made that all support for IDP school facilities would cease from the start of this school year.

In Duhok, northwest Iraq, the Ministry of Migration and Displacement stated they would cease paying rent on buildings used as schools for IDP children.

As a result, approximately 60,000 children in 12 official IDP camps in the Duhok area were at risk of losing access to education, the NRC said.

A teacher counting students in the schoolyard due to a lack of school building - back to school day 2019-2020 in Aljaleel school, Mosul [Tom Peyre-Costa/NRC]
A teacher counting students in the schoolyard due to a lack of school building [Tom Peyre-Costa/NRC]

Peyre-Costa told Al Jazeera the closure of schools is one of the multiple government measures designed to encourage people to return home.

«But by closing IDP schools, the government just pushes children out of schools, not out of camps,» he said.

«The education of their children is often sacrificed vis-a-vis security issues, or simply the lack of a home to return to.»

Source of the notice: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/rights-group-iraq-education-system-brink-collapse-191028180740513.html

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New Zealand: Education Minister Chris Hipkins refuses ‘crisis’ meeting with ECE groups

Oceania/ New Zealand/ 09.07.2019/ Source: www.rnz.co.nz.

Four groups representing early childhood centres and kindergartens are seeking an urgent meeting with Education Minister Chris Hipkins.

The Early Childhood Council, Te Rito Maioha, New Zealand Kindergartens and Montessori Aotearoa New Zealand said services were struggling to survive because of chronic underfunding and a shortage of qualified teachers.

The chief executive of the Early Childhood Council, Peter Reynolds, said early childhood centres were in a financial crisis and the 1.8 percent increase to subsidies included in the most recent government Budget was nowhere near enough.

«We’ve had over a decade of cuts, 1.8 percent just really doesn’t do it though we’re grateful for anything we can get, but you’ve got services going to the wall,» Mr Reynolds said.

«I’ve got centres where the owner-operator of the business hasn’t taken any drawings out of their business for the last several years at least. I’ve got centres where one person’s telling me as the centre manager that she’s earning less than the maintenance person.»

Mr Reynolds said his organisation and three others, Te Rito Maioha, New Zealand Kindergartens and the Montessori Association had asked the Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, for an urgent meeting without Ministry of Education staff present.

«We want to talk to the minister directly, we want to have an off-the-record conversation and we want to get a very clear idea about what the minister has proposed to do and by when.»

Mr Reynolds said early childhood services needed to see a light at the end of the tunnel and it needed to be realistic.

Services could not simply make more money by increasing their fees because many parents could not afford to pay more for early childhood education, he said.

Mr Reynolds said the minister had turned down the request for a meeting and asked for further information, which was highly disappointing.

Mr Hipkins said he had asked for a detailed breakdown of key issues «as a means of facilitating further talks».

He said the government had increased early childhood subsidies by 1.6 percent this year and 1.8 percent next year, which was significantly more than the sector had received since 2009.

Mr Hipkins said the ministry did not hold figures on the early learning workforce but there was «a clear tightening of teacher supply».

But the chief executive of Te Rito Maioha, which represents several hundred services, Kathy Wolfe, said government had not done enough to deliver on pre-election promises such as raising the minimum number of teachers required to work with children under the age of two, and re-introducing a higher rate of funding for services where all teachers were qualified, registered teachers.

Ms Wolfe said early childhood services felt the government had put them in a holding pattern and many were struggling while they waited for things to improve.

«We have had members closing their centres over the last few years due to the financial crisis,» she said.

Ms Wolfe said many centres had used their financial reserves and the government needed to significantly improve subsidies for the sector.

«Just to meet the shortfall of funding from the last seven years we need the government to inject 7 percent into the sector just to catch up, that’s about $130 million.»

The owner of six early childhood centres, Maria Johnson, said the entire sector was struggling and one of the biggest problems was a shortage of qualified teachers.

«We are really struggling at the moment with a number of things, particularly the massive, massive shortage of teachers in the sector, not just the qualified teachers but teachers with a real understanding of our early childhood curriculum,» she said.

«Our staff just aren’t paid what they should be getting paid.»

Ms Johnson said the sector was badly under-funded and some centres had been forced to close while her own centres had increased their fees.

The government needed to increase subsidies in a way that ensured the money went to teachers’ pay and to improving the quality of education, she said.

Many people in early childhood had hoped a Labour-led government would make significant changes but that had not happened yet, she said.

Education Ministry figures showed 83 early childhood services closed last year and 82 closed in 2017, an increase in the roughly 50 a year that closed in most of the preceding years.

Meanwhile, the number of new services last year reached its lowest point since 2007 at 146.

Source of the notice: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/393873/education-minister-chris-hipkins-refuses-crisis-meeting-with-ece-groups

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