EDUCATION Secretary Leonor Briones said the Department of Education (DepEd) is now working on securing the support of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) for the expansion of teacher positions.
Briones, in her speech during the National Teacher’s Day celebration at a mall in Cagayan de Oro City over the weekend, said they are proposing to add to the present Teacher 1, teacher 2 and Teacher 3 the new positions of Teacher 4, Teacher 5, Teacher 6 and Teacher 7, with their corresponding higher salary grades.
“Expanding the teaching positions will allow our T1, T2 and T3 teachers, comprising more than 90 percent of our teaching force, greater opportunity for promotion with the corresponding increase in salary levels,” Briones said.
The education secretary also assured the thousands of teachers and school leaders during the activity that the DBM is completing the study on benchmarking of salaries of government personnel.
She said they are now anticipating that the promise new round of salary increase for all employees of the government will be announced by the Office of the President or its authorized representative soon.
“But the good news comes with a challenge. As we increase the salaries and improve the terms of employment of our public school teachers, we expect our teachers to be the driving force to raise the quality of the country’s basic education,” Briones said.
Apart from the initiative to expand the teacher positions, Briones said there is also the ongoing transformation of the National Educators Academy of the Philippines (NEAP), wherein the DepEd will be integrating the professional development program and aligning it to the career progression and promotion system for teachers.
The new professional development, which will start in 2020, will have a built-in process for teachers to be able to translate their own learning into classroom teaching improvements.
“The new professional development program will empower our teachers to make transformative reforms in classroom instruction for quality,” Briones said.
“There is much work to be done. The fight for quality will require no less than a national movement, with our teachers at the forefront,” she added.