EXPLORING CHALLENGES IN TEACHER DEPLOYMENT UNDER DECENTRALIZATION OF THE PRIMARY EDUCATION SYSTEM: A CASE OF CHIRADZULU DISTRICT

Abstract

The study attempted to examine the issues of teacher deployment at district level. This study was prompted by the fact that there are inequitable distributions of teachers not just between rural and urban areas but also between rural and remote rural primary schools. The study also looked at the why teachers preferred certain primary schools over others even though they belonged to the same district. A case study of two schools in Chiradzulu district was used to understand this. The researcher used focus group discussions, interview with key informants and document analysis to collect data. A total of twenty participants were involved in the study. The researcher used thematic data analysis to analyze the data. The study discovered that some schools close to the district centers were overstaffed while those in remotest areas were understaffed. As such, the problem of inequitable distribution of teachers in the district was not mainly in terms of numbers, but rather deployment process. The study discovered that the district office experienced various challenges when deploying teachers in the remotest areas of the district. Majority of teachers that were deployed in the district did not want to teacher in the remotest schools of the district for various reasons. Furthermore, lack of communication between the district office and the schools, pressure from stakeholders, lack of financial and human resource and inadequate number of teachers allocated to the district did not help the situation. District offices should therefore be rational and practice equity when deploying the teachers so that the remotest areas should also get the much needed resource, teachers. Furthermore, the function of teacher recruitment should be decentralized to the districts. So that the district should be able to identify teachers who are willing to teach in the remote schools of the district.