Registration does not guarantee a teacher’s job.

This was highlighted by the Fiji Teachers Registration Authority (FTRA) Chief Executive Officer Sanjeeta Singh while presenting the organisation’s audit report for the financial year of 2019-2020 to the Public Accounts Standing Committee.

Ms Singh said the registration was a licence that allowed teachers to teach in Fiji.

“By law, teachers must be registered first before they are allowed in the classroom to teach,” she said.

“Teachers must register after graduation. This is whether they will be employed to by a private school or by the Ministry of Education.”

“The placement of teachers purely depends on the employer; we do not have any say in this.’

“If you pass the open merit recruit system then you will be given a place, there is no favouritism within the ministry.”

Data different from ministry

She said data the organisation has does not coincide with the total number of teachers the ministry has.

“The FTRA will always have a higher number of registered teachers because we also register teachers who are employed by private schools,” she said.

Also, we register teachers who teach in higher educations. They teach training programmes in vocational schools.”

As of yesterday, there were 15,082 teachers registered by the organisation and not all were employed by the Minis- try of Education.

Software for registration

In a bid to improve services, the organisation is setting up a new software to make registration for teachers easier and user friendly.

“The software currently being used by the organisation is owned by the Ministry of Education,” she said.

“We register teachers using the portal, the ministry uploads the contracts and salaries.

“In our five-year strategic plan, we will work with our developing partners like Australia and New Zealand to start our own online registration portal.”

She said they would ensure that the new software was linked to the ministry’s data to ensure there was no gap.

“It took us so long to ensure teachers in Fiji are registered under FTRA. We do not want to lose anyone,” she said.

“The recent software being used by the organisation is user friendly but at times the ‘govnet’ is down and there’s no connectivity which makes it hard for us to register teachers.

“At the moment, for a teacher to be registered a staff needed to be present physically in the office which was a challenge for us during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We will not be able to provide service if there’s another pandemic. We need a software that can be accessed anywhere by staff. We also want a portale that will provide teachers with identification card,” she said.

She said no payments can be done on M-PAiSA.

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