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Abstract:
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Malawi announced free primary education in 1994 soon after the transition to multi-party democracy. As a result numbers enrolled in primary schools increased rapidly from about 1.9 million to 2.8 million creating an unprecedented demand for new teachers. The Malawi government responded by introducing an emergency training programme for newly recruited untrained teachers. The existing full-time pre-career College-based training system was replaced by the Malawi Integrated In-Service Teacher Education Programme (MIITEP), comprising a total of four months College-based training and 20 months supervised teaching in schools. This, slightly adapted, remains the only method of training primary teachers. This programme of research was designed to explore different aspects of MIITEP within the framework provided by the Multi-Site Teacher Education Project (MUSTER), an initiative co-ordinated from the University of Sussex and financially supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The Centre for Educational Research and Training (CERT) in Zomba designed an extensive programme of data collection and analysis to explore the characteristics of those participating in MIITEP, their experiences of the training programme both in College and in school, their reflections after training once they had become qualified, and supply and demand and cost issues. Insights into MIITEP are important both for Malawi and for other countries which have the problem of training large numbers of primary teachers to meet the demands created by commitments to Education for All. It is a mixed-mode programme based on two short residential periods separated by a lengthy school-based programme supported at a distance and through local in-service seminars. It is capable of training large numbers at lower costs than conventional college-based systems. The results of this research provide an empirical base for policy discussions about how teacher education should develop in the future. Enrolment growth has to be complemented by a supply of trained teachers of sufficient quality and quantity to meet demand and keep pupil-teacher ratios at appropriate levels. This must be achieved at sustainable levels of costs. |