The Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) has turned its focus to teacher quality assurance to improve the quality of education.

This was declared yesterday at the opening of a two-day summit on teacher education, management and professionalisation.

According to the Minister of Education, Dr. Charles Muligande, the quality of education in the country cannot be attained if the teachers who are the backbone of the change are not taken into account.

"The enhancement in the quality of education can be attained through improvement of infrastructure. However, unless the quality of the teachers is assured, nothing can be attained,” Muligande said.

Muligande further noted that it is the teacher who makes a difference between success and failure, depending on how much he or she has been given.

"The biggest numbers of our teachers are qualified, but these teachers qualified with inadequate training, which is why we want to start training them while they are serving,” he said.

He added that the summit was going to discuss and come out with recommendations on how the teachers would be able to get trained while serving and how the pre-service training for teachers in the teacher training institutions can be strengthened.

"We want all the teachers to continue upgrading their education until they all attain degrees in education.”
Currently, Rwanda has three pre-service teacher training institutions namely; Teacher Training Colleges (TTCs) which train primary school teachers, Colleges of Education (CoEs) which trains lower secondary teachers and the Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) which trains upper secondary teachers.

In an interview with The New Times, the Minister highlighted that one of the ways through which they are going to ensure quality in all these institutions, was to put them all under the custodian of KIE.

"Each of these colleges has been working without guidance and supervision, but we are going to put them under KIE’s guidance so that it monitors them on a regular basis.”

Speaking at the summit, the Director of the Teacher Service Commission, Emmanuel Muvunyi, said that one of the ways to ensure teacher quality was the implementation of the Teacher Development and Management policy.

The policy, aspires among other things to develop a knowledge based and technology-led economy, which is one of the pillars of national development.

According to DFID’s Richard Arden, one of the ways to getting qualitative and better result-oriented teachers is to revive the self esteem of teachers in society, so that they can know that they are the backbone of development.

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