Bangladesh observes World Teachers’ Day today, in the backdrop of low pay continuing to encourage the talented among the young primary teachers to quit teaching for better paid jobs.
Poor pay remains a major cause of declining standards of primary education, which is supposed to shape the young learners across the country.
Young Honours graduates and Master’s degree holders, appointed in primary schools, government or private, keep looking for better paid jobs, worried educationists said.
Approximately 40 per cent of the teachers leave the profession within five years of recruitment and the talented among them quit even earlier,’ Bangladesh Primary Teachers’ Association general secretary BM Asad Ullah said.
The entry point pay for an assistant teacher, fresh out of university, with an Honours graduation or a Master’s degree, is equivalent to that of a government employee in the 16th grade of the national pay scale, just one slab above a class IV employee, he said.
A trained assistant teacher in government primary schools gets Tk 4,700 a month as basic pay, but an assistant teacher without training gets Tk 4,500, a trained head teacher gets Tk 5,500, but a head teacher without training gets Tk 5,300 plus 60 per cent of basic as house rent allowance in the cities and 45 per cent in the rural areas, said Asad Ullah, who is also the head teacher of Bangshal Government Night Primary School in the capital.
A primary teacher is also entitled to get Tk 700 a month as medical allowances and Tk 150 as meal allowance plus Tk 150 as conveyance allowance in the cities, he said.
Teachers said that the situation was even worse in many privately run primary schools.
At the entry point, a teacher in the primary section institutions like privately run Moniza Rahman Girls’ School and College at Gendaria in the capital city gets a monthly consolidated pay of Tk 2,000, they said.
A teacher of English and Mathematics in a privately run school gets Tk 3,500 a month, they said.
Teachers said that many privately run primary schools ignore with impunity a government directive that set a teacher’s minimum pay at Tk 4,500 a month.
Low pay mainly compels teachers to go for private
tuitions, writing guide-books or other parallel jobs, said Matia Begum, assistant teacher of Ahmedbagh Adarsha High School in the city.
Bangladesh Teachers’ Association president Mohammad Azizul Islam said that privately run schools do not pay annual increments, time scale, medial allowance, festival allowance, pension or gratuity to teachers.
‘We get a monthly house rent allowance of Tk 100 which is good for nothing,’ said Azizul Islam, also a former head teacher of Community Centre Adarsha High School at Tejgaon Industrial Area in the city.
The association leaders requested the government to immediately announce a separate pay scale for the teachers according to their qualifications to remove the gross discrepancies in the pay structure and also to raise their dignity in the society.
‘It is not at all acceptable that the society would deprive only the teachers when the others would enjoy all privileges and advantages,’ said eminent educationist, Professor Emeritus Sirajul Islam Chowdhury.
He described it as regrettable that the teachers had been relegated to become an under-privileged class.
He said that much of unnecessary expenditure on civil and military bureaucracy and on elected representatives could be diverted to improve the ailing education system and to ensure fundamental needs of the teachers.
Prof Sirajul Islam Chowdhury suggested that the teachers have to be provided with an acceptable standard of living.
The director general of Secondary and Higher Education Mohammad Noman-ur-Rashid said that the National Education Policy, now under process, proposed a separate pay scale for teachers.
He said once the new policy was adopted the separate scale would be implemented gradually.
