Pilot Teacher Training Institutions receive equipment to support Teachers Registration
UNESCO with support from the Capacity Building for Education 2030 (CapED) programme has provided over the last ten years, support to the Government of Uganda through the Ministry of Education and Sports, Teacher Instructors, Education and Training Department to strengthen the capacity of teachers to address the challenges that face the teaching profession. Some of the interventions realized to date address key areas of teacher welfare, quality teaching, teacher motivation and competencies. The Teacher Management Information System (TMIS developed with support from UNESCO and anchored on the Teacher Policy, is one of the most notable achievement realized under this intervention. As follow up, UNESCO has equipped 3 Pilot Teacher Training Institutions (TTIs) in Uganda with an assortment of ICT equipment aimed at supporting the enrollment of pre-service and In-service teachers on the TMIS online system.
The 3 TTIs selected to benefit from this initiative include, Arua Core PTC, National Teachers College, Mubende and Kibuli Core PTC. The Institutions will now serve as hub to train teachers and mentor them to upload their bio data into TMIS and continuously update the information for use as and when required.
While receiving the equipment and officially launching a TMIS center at Arua Core PTC on behalf of Ministry of Education and Sports, Mr. Max Okiror, Assistant Commissioner Secondary Teacher Education commended UNESCO for the generous support provided through the donations. He challenged the institutions to be a center of excellence in Uganda for teacher enrollment and registration. He further urged the teachers in the West Nile region to embrace change which is currently sweeping through the education sector in the country, adding: “Change is better, there has been a lot of irregularities associated with teachers’ registration and the new system is in place to address this.”
Mr. Okiror encouraged the teachers and tutors in the West Nile region to make efforts to upgrade their levels of education in order to stand a better chance of remaining in the system. He added that a number of teacher training institutions in the country will be phased out and at least 3 others upgraded to Instructor College levels to complement the only existing institution, Abilonino National Instructors College.
Mr. Ismail Banduga, the UNESCO National Project Coordinator for NTI in Uganda informed the stakeholders present at the launch that UNESCO is the UN Agency mandated to globally coordinate the attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) on Quality Education, which seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. He added that interventions through the CapED project will go a long way in supporting the realization of this goal.
Teacher Training Institutions in Uganda play an important role in not only training and modelling pre-service teachers to provide the much-needed teaching workforce in Uganda, but they also offer training opportunity for in-service capacity building for Continuous Professional Development in emerging competency areas such as ICT.
The overall goal of this intervention is in line with improving the teacher programmes in Uganda through efficient and effective teacher data storage, management and utilization. To realize this objective, 15 tutors in the beneficiary institutions were effectively trained to act as mentors to support other teacher registration into TMIS.
Among the ICT toolkits handed over to the institutions included desktop computers, monitors and projectors. The equipment will act as basic tracking tools to the 3 teacher training institutions to enable documentation and reporting on teachers that will have accessed the TTI facilities for registration into TMIS online system.