Students behavioural issues faced by teachers after the COVID-19 pandemic has been noted by the Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, Premila Kumar. This was discussed during a talanoa session with teachers from Xavier College in Ba on Tuesday.

“There are a lot of student behavioural issues in the classroom and we want to address that and we need to take into consideration our teachers who have to deal with the students on a daily basis and particularly when students don’t behave,” Ms Kumar said.

She said some teachers resorted to corporal punishment when frustrated with the behaviour shown by students.

“There is high blood pressure in our teachers, they’re frustrated and sometimes they give the child a whack and when that happens, of course, it’s against the policy and the policy is made on the law itself.”

“This is the Child Protection Act and the Child Protection Act protects the child from any form of abuse,” she said.

“So that’s where unnecessarily our teachers get into trouble and we need to work out a system not only to deal with the student behavioural issues and how it impacts the teacher but also to look at other issues that teachers face in their day-to-day life.”

She said the Ministry of Education was also focusing on primary-level education due to the learning difficulties faced by students at that stage which was brought into their secondary level.

Putting The Effort

“We all know that in primary school if the students are groomed well if they love teaching, they’re able to improve their literacy and numeracy, then the students will be able to excel, do better when they go to secondary,” she said.

“But if we have not put in good efforts in our children, at a young age, same students when they end up in secondary school, they’re not able to read, write, they’re not able to do maths, they’re not able to study other science subjects and that causes frustration not only in teachers, but it causes frustration in students.”

She said this was why the ministry removed a number of subjects from Years One to Three and introduced literacy and numeracy, civic and moral education, along with language and physical education and art and craft with more emphasis on numeracy and literacy.

“That’s what we have to do and to help us with our numeracy and literacy curriculum obviously DFAT came on board.”

“We’ve got 90 champion schools, we are trialling it and come next year, we should be able to roll it out from year one to year four,” Minister Kumar said.

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