Fifty per cent of applicants for teaching vacancies who sat the first English Proficiency Test failed.

The shock result was confirmed by Permanent Secretary for Education Iowane Tiko last night.

He said out of 3250 applicants for the 2545 vacancies, only 1627 passed the English test.

Mr Tiko said the result vindicated the initiative by the Education Minister and Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum to deal with the poor standard of English in schools.

“It proves what we have suspected all along,” he said.

He said while the ministry was aware of the standard the fact that 1623 failed was shocking because it was high.

However, he said, they would be given a second chance to resit the test on Saturday at the various centres.

If they failed again, then they had to look for other jobs, he said.

He clarified that the test only applied to new graduates coming out of tertiary institutions and others trying to enter the teaching profession.

He said it did not apply to existing teachers. The vacancies range from early childhood education teaching to secondary schools.

Mr Tiko said the applicants did well in the job test but they did not do well in the English test.

“The job test was mostly about machinery, reporting, communication and all that,” he said.

On the English result, he said tertiary institutions had been telling them that their intakes coming in to do programmes in education had got very low English abilities.

“This means that English wasn’t really there when they passed Form Seven (Year 13), to enable them to articulate well and express themselves well at university level,” Mr Tiko said.

“Policies on the use of English language in schools are not consistent across all schools. Some people actually do it from A to Z, some people think that they can just fiddle around with it, have it documented but it’s not taken seriously.

“Another one and that has been a long standing argument from my point of view as a curriculum developer is that we did not adhere to the literacy and numeracy demands that were upon us from the days of the Education For All initiative.

“When the initiative was implemented in 2008, our laxity cost us a lot of negative implications.

“One of those negative implications is the existence of non-readers at our secondary school level or high school level.

“They just can’t read. They can speak English but they can’t read and write. So the literacy and numeracy initiatives were supposed to have started way back then because the education for all goals were targeted towards those.

“And literacy and numeracy were included in it. And we did not take a serious stand to adhere to that.

“What happened was that we did not have policies of literacy and numeracy done at all levels. ECE, primary and high school.”

He said the new initiative was aimed at salvaging our education system.

The applicants would be informed of the result today. Teachers applying for promotion would sit the test too, he said.

They would still have to find ways to test the other teachers who did not sit the test.

Edited by George Kulamaiwasa

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