A five-year freeze on issuing visas to workers from Bangladesh has led to a crisis of Bangla teachers in schools in Abu Dhabi.
The Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bangladesh Islamia School is one of the two Bangladesh-curriculum schools in UAE and it teaches both English and Bangla under the Dhaka board curriculum.
The school has not been able to recruit teachers from Bangladesh since the ban which came into effect in 2012, reports The National.
In a press conference, the school’s Principal Mir Anisul Hasan said: “We are able to recruit from here but Bangladeshi teachers very often are rejected, even locally, approval we are not getting.
“We need some help. I tried to pass the message … that we are suffering for want of teachers.”
Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bangladesh Islamia School
CourtesyThe leader of Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bangladesh Islamia School says children are losing their Bangladeshi culture as they cannot recruit more teachers from their homeland.
The Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Bangladesh Islamia School has 49 teachers and 19 teaching assistants from Bangladesh, which is half’s of its staff.
Of the 665 students who attended the school last year, 98% were Bangladeshi, 1% was Indian and 1% was from Sri Lankan.
Stating that most of the curriculum’s books are in English, he said: “For the teachers who have already been working for many years, they are here, but new recruitment is not possible from Bangladesh.
“So teachers coming from other countries like India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, they can teach,”
However, Hasan expressed his concern about the students being detached from Bangla language and culture.
“The thing is, starting from grade nine to grade 12, we need expert teachers who have got expertise in learning and teaching scenarios from Bangladesh,” he said.
Talking about the importance of Bangladeshi teachers, he said: “It’s about cultural orientation and cultural familiarity. I have seen that students are getting away from our culture due to lack of training in cultural consciousness.
“They find it a little difficult to write in Bangla, though they speak it very well. This is an alarming situation. If there is no good training from the mother tongue, I am sure innate education will never happen.”
