Govt moves to regulate teaching, introduce service commission

The Ministry of Education has launched two significant consultancy bids aimed at introducing a teaching licence requirement, performance guidelines and a teaching service commission, Barbados TODAY can reveal.

A search of the procurement section of the Barbados Integrated Government (BIG) Portal–a website that provides information on government departments, agencies, and ministries–revealed that the ministry is seeking consultancy bids to develop the project, which will fall under the Barbados Teaching Services Commission (BTSC).

The consultancy’s aim is to assist the ministry in establishing a regime and guidelines for regulating the profession under the commission.

The ministry has given prospective consultants until Wednesday to submit their bids.

Barbados TODAY also found that the ministry plans to engage another consultant to design and establish an external quality assurance body for the education system.

The official procurement website states that the objective of that consultancy is to assist the government, through the ministry, to modernise the regulatory framework for a transformed and inclusive education sector; to design and establish an External Quality Assurance Body for the Barbados Education System; and the establishment of a National Education Quality Assurance Agency.

The consultancy will also help develop a schools’ quality assurance framework, design the structure and procedures for the execution of the functions within this framework, create school performance indicators specific to Barbados, and outline the policy and legislative framework for school quality assurance.

It will further aim to provide specifications based on an assessment of the ministry’s OpenEMIS–the education management information system that tracks students’ progress throughout their school life–to determine how an inspection system within OpenEMIS can be configured with the necessary security and data protection features.

The president of the Barbados Secondary Teachers Union, Mary Redman and the president of the Barbados Teachers Union (BUT) Rudy Lovell could not immediately provide comment on the development. (EJ)