Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

More than 50 per cent of teach­ers from the eight ed­u­ca­tion­al dis­tricts blanked Gov­ern­ment's Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) train­ing which took place on Mon­day, ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cials of the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion TTUTA. In an in­ter­view, TTUTA's vice pres­i­dent, Da­vanand Sinanan said teach­ers from the St Patrick, Vic­to­ria and Ca­roni re­gions com­plained that they were be­ing vic­timised for not at­tend­ing the train­ing ses­sion.

"The in­for­ma­tion reach­ing us is that all cen­tres had un­der 50 per cent turn out. In ten to 12 cen­tres lo­cat­ed in sev­er­al dis­tricts the at­ten­dance was be­tween 35 per cent to 40 per cent," Sinanan said. Say­ing that the train­ing was a fail­ure, Sinanan said the union was grate­ful that the ma­jor­i­ty of teach­ers heed­ed the call. How­ev­er, he said TTUTA would not tol­er­ate vic­tim­i­sa­tion.

"We are con­cerned that su­per­vi­sors and prin­ci­pals have threat­ened teach­ers who re­port­ed for du­ty yes­ter­day (Mon­day). They are in­tim­i­dat­ing teach­ers and are in­di­cat­ing that if they come to school they will not be al­lowed to sign the reg­is­ter. This is il­le­gal, it con­sti­tutes a lock­out un­der the law," Sinanan said.

He added: "We are call­ing on teach­ers not be in­tim­i­dat­ed by prin­ci­pals and su­per­vi­sors who are break­ing the law." Sinanan said TTUTA would stand firm­ly be­hind teach­ers and would take every means nec­es­sary to pro­tect staff. He said TTUTA stood by its po­si­tion that the CAC train­ing should be held dur­ing the two-month va­ca­tion pe­ri­od.

He not­ed that it was ir­re­spon­si­ble of the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry to take out over 1,000 teach­ers from pri­ma­ry schools to at­tend the train­ing at the height of the school term. Sinanan said the loss of valu­able teach­ing time would af­fect the re­sults of na­tion­al tests.

In a state­ment, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion said the CAC pro­gramme was meant to pre­pare teach­ers for the pro­posed Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA). CAC pro­pos­es to add phys­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion and vi­su­al and per­form­ing arts com­po­nents to the SEA in 2013. TTUTA said it had not been con­sult­ed by the min­istry and ex­pressed con­cern that the pro­gramme­ was foun­da­tion­al­ly lack­ing.