Online Reporter
Nyore Madzianike, [email protected]
GOVERNMENT registered more than 800 schools in 2025 and is targeting another 800 this year as it pushes ahead with a sweeping transformation of the education sector, backed by the recruitment of 3 000 teachers this quarter, Primary and Secondary Education Minister Torerai Moyo has said.
The Minister said the new posts will be filled once an ongoing rationalisation exercise — aimed at identifying staffing gaps — is completed by the end of February.
As part of the education reform under the National Development Strategy 2 (NDS2), all satellite schools are set to operate independently by the end of 2026 with substantive headmasters and examination centres.
Already, funds have been allocated for the recruitment of teachers, with the process expected to begin early next month.
Government has also received about US$2,4 million earmarked for schools’ development, to give impetus to the Heritage-Based Education 5.0 model that has since been rolled out.
Minister Moyo said this while responding to questions from legislators during Wednesday’s National Assembly question-and-answer session.
Lawmakers sought clarification on Government policy regarding satellite schools, their registration and the elimination of red tape, as well as infrastructure development and procurement of learning materials such as textbooks.
In response, Minister Moyo said registration of schools is part of Government key result areas.
“In 2025, we managed to register more than 800 schools. As we have begun a new journey and a new year under the National Development Strategy 2 (NDS2), we are planning to decentralise the registration process so that it is done at provincial offices.
“The reason why it is taking so long is that some people delay approaching the district office, then when the district office visits the school, they will then process the application forms.”
He said the registration process has two stages, which are the application for the establishment of a school and the actual application to register it.
Minister Moyo acknowledged bottlenecks in the process, saying these had prompted the decentralisation of registration to the provincial level.
On capacitation, he said Government provides complementary funding and school improvement grants to support satellite schools.
“That is the funding that we use to assist the satellite schools. We have a particular fund reserved to capacitate schools so that they improve on infrastructural development.
“So, we give them five thousand to finish, whether it could be security or roofing and whatever refurbishments that might be happening in schools,” he said.
Minister Moyo said Government had received US$2,4 million from Unicef to support schools.
“In fact, last year we managed to achieve our target. We got US$2,4 million this week from Unicef.
“We were given a target to register a number of schools so that we can access the US$2,4 million. I am happy to inform the August House that we achieved our target schools.
“Now we can access US$2,4 million, which we are going to spend on assisting those schools so that they have the funding to complete their buildings and they are able to register their schools.
“In terms of textbooks, we have the funding from the fiscus that we can use towards the purchase of exercise and textbooks or any other teaching and learning material that is required in our schools,” he said.
On teacher recruitment, Minister Moyo said there is a staff rationalisation process that is currently underway.
“Currently, Madam Speaker, since the beginning of the first term of 2026, we have not started recruiting teachers because we observed that there is overstaffing in most of our schools.
“We have embarked on a rationalisation exercise where we have identified the schools in certain districts and provinces that are overstaffed.
“As we transfer those teachers at schools that are overstaffed to schools that have the need, we will get to a point sometime this month where we will complete the rationalisation exercise, which is the time when we are going to recruit teachers.
“As I said, last time we had two types of teacher recruitment. Recruitment towards attrition posts, these are posts that are vacant as a result of various reasons, transfers, deaths and replacement for people who might have been discharged for whatever reasons.
“Now, we were allocated funding to recruit up to three thousand teachers under expansion posts.
“These are the two categories, as soon as rationalisation is done, then we can proceed to recruit our teachers and that will not take long, any time this month or early in March.”
Under the Second Republic, Zimbabwe is implementing a massive education sector overhaul, transitioning from a theoretical Competency-Based Curriculum to a Heritage-Based Curriculum (2024–2030), focusing on innovation and industrialisation.
This approach focuses on skills over theory and to enable this Government has rolled out a massive construction of new schools, is hiring teachers to reduce class sizes and has also introduced ICT tools to enhance digital learning.
