Bridgetown.
Principal of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies(UWI) Sir Hilary Beckles, is suggesting mathematics and science teachers be paid more in order to stop falling grades in these subjects at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate level.
"We know that there is a fundamental challenge before us in the transmission of mathematical knowledge and skills to our young generation. So few of our teachers in the Caribbean are mathematics graduates because the private sector has pulled them out of the school system and persons with mathematics and physics degrees were going into the accounting, banking and insurance sectors, as they do so, the first consequence of that was the collapse in the performance in the science subjects", says Sir Hilary.
Speaking at the launch of UWITube, an online programme designed to teach mathematics, in the main conference room of the UWI administration building, Sir Hilary said it might be time to pay teachers of those subjects more money in order to keep them teaching.
" I have always been of the view that one of the reactions we ought to have for that is differential salaries in the school system for science teachers. In In our university, we have a medical salary scale and a non medcial salary scale. The medical professors are paid more than all of us because the university realized if it needed to retain the services of our medical practitioners to teach medical sciences, we needed to give them a differential salary", he added.
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