Coordination,Collaboration And Feedback:Nexus Between University Education And Needs Of Employment

About 50%of the total number of secondary school teachers teaching in Malawi is not 'unqualified';and net enrollment of eligible pupils in secondary schools is at 35%per year.This study sought to establish factors affecting access to quality and relevant secondary education in Malawi with reference to coordination,collaboration and feedback between teacher education(universities)and the Ministry of Education.The study also sought to establish why only about half of the total number of secondary school teachers in Malawi is 'qualified' when there are public funded universities that are mandated to train teachers.The study employed Systems Theory with augment of Human Capital Theory to assess the situation.Senior officials from the Ministry of Education and teacher training colleges participated in the study.Findings showed that there is weak collaboration,coordination and feedback between teacher education institutions and the Ministry of Education and that this scenario contributes to the problem.While the MoE was perceived to have a good coordination structure,the fact that practically coordination was ironically understood as poor implies that good coordination structures do not necessarily translate into good coordination in an organization.The study has also established that,ceteris paribus,the weak linkage has resulted into many mismatches between perceptions of the ministry and those of training institutions on the problem understudy.The study further found out that there are slight variations on core education courses taught by different universities under bachelor of education degrees.Furthermore,it was established that while the ministry has more than 50%of the total employed teachers who are unqualified and it is in want of about 50%more teachers,there are ironically many qualified teachers that the ministry has not employed;at least from the preceding three cohorts.The findings suggest that there should be increased and improved interface between the Ministry of Education and secondary school teacher education institutions in order to improve and increase access to quality and relevant education.The findings agree with one of the key tenets of Systems Theory that when part of the whole is not well connected to a system,the functioning of the whole body(like an education system),gets affected.The study hence recommends that,to improve quality and relevance of education,the ministry should urgently train or 'retires' all the unqualified teachers already in the system and expedite employment of the qualified teachers who the system needs but are not employed.Preferably,the Ministry of Education could provide immediate in-service training for the untrained teachers in liaison with SSTEIs while at the same time beefing up the number of trained teachers by employing the graduate teachers who are still not deployed.In the long run,the MoE is encouraged to work with SSTEIs so that they develop a clear roadmap for training,recruitment and retaining trained teachers.It is in this line that a Need-based Educational Model has been proposed(See 10.3.6),The proposed Need-based Educational Model outlined in Chapter 10 focuses on how the whole process ranging from educational planning to implementation could ensure relevance of implementing the needed curriculum.The proposed model is also designed to emphasize the need for developing educational plans that are based on the needs of the people and on the visions they desire to be in.This study also learned that teacher educators too do not have a suitable forum for sharing what goes well and what does not work in teacher education.This study,therefore,recommends for the establishment of a teacher educators' forum where critical issues in teacher education and education at large would be topical.On feedback from practicing teachers,the study recommends that there should be periodic ways of getting feedback from practicing teachers in order to learn what works and what does not work from teacher education.This could involve establishing linkages which would help in improving teacher education and in reinforcing some of the issues that may have been missed during pre-service education.It is hoped that feedback from graduate teachers would also inform curriculum particularly with the finding that some teachers do not see the value of some of the courses they learned.On variations in what different teacher education institutions teach in pre-service teacher education,this study recommends that Malawi should develop a Qualifications Framework for Teachers(QFT)so that a graduate teacher from any college should pass through equivalent processes such that their minimum expected competencies should be the same irrespective of which institution a teacher was trained at.In summary,the findings of this study have raised so many practical and theoretical implications about the nexus between university teacher pre-service education and the employment world of graduates.