THE Department of Higher Education, Research Science and Technology (DHERST) is working to improve teacher’s certificate and to minimize fraudulent use of certificates.
DHERST Acting Secretary Dr Francis Hualupmomi told this paper that improvement of the certificates will ensure that qualified teachers go and teach to improve the quality and standard of education.
“As you know many teachers, they use fake certificate and teaching in insinuations and we have ghost names in the salary system. So, we are trying to avoid such issue to ensure transparency in recruitment of teachers, to ensure that qualified teachers go and teach, to improve the quality and standard of education,” he told this paper.
“So, one way to do that is to design a standardize certificate so that the certificate is authenticate and can be used anywhere in the world (not only in PNG). This is basically to avoid academic fraud and when I say academic fraud is using someone’s certificate or duplicate a certificate to get an employment.
“Academic fraud is a problem which many of the teachers have been removed due to that and all the ghost names from the education department. We are now inheriting these challenges from the Department of Education. And for us, we have to manage it now in order to improve the quality of education at the secondary and primary level.
“Our products go back to secondary schools so we need quality graduates, a person with an authenticate certificate to go and teach at secondary and primary school. We don’t want people to come and buy certificate or scan a certificate to go and teach. Through this process certificate will be issued to genuine graduates.
“We have a service provider whose working on the certificate. Once it is done there’ll be a serial number so that when the certificate is issued, it cannot be fraudulently used anywhere,” Dr Hualupmomi added.
“It would be completed by the end of December and the first quarter of 2023 we will issue it to all the colleges. I have issued a circular to all the colleges advising them of this process that we are going through, so students are also advised that they will be getting their certificate in next January or they may cancel the graduation and wait until the certificates are ready. Some colleges have gone ahead to hold graduations, we only gave them a piece of notes.”
He added that this would be the first issue of teachers certificated under DHERST, after it was being transferred from the Department of Education to DHERST.
