Education Ministry continues consultations on improving education sector

The Ministry of Education has once again engaged with stakeholders to solicit their views on how to improve the country’s education sector.

Speaking during the recent exercise held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, Education Minister Priya Manickchand underscored the importance of this undertaking, especially coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This is important for us. While this consultation is framed in a worldwide movement right now, so UN countries are currently, and some have finished, engaged in consulting in and around on how to recover from COVID and how we could reimagine education, generally. This, for us, is a process that is not foreign.

“In getting to our strategic plan we had massive consultations across the country with different interest groups and that is the same thing we want to do to arrive at this particular plan where we’ll have an outcome,” Manickchand said during her presentation at the consultation.
Manickchand expressed that COVID taught the world that no education system was resilient enough to withstand the impact of such a pandemic.
“I think, the consensus was there around the world that we weren’t meeting needs and that we had become too ensconced in doing things traditionally in the same way. And then came COVID. And if we were ever unsure about whether our systems were resilient and whether we could deliver education in varied ways, we learnt as a world that nobody was ready,” the Education Minister stated.
Meanwhile, Chief Education Officer, Dr Marcel Hutson said that innovation and creativity must be brought into focus if the sector is to be transformed.
“I wish to say this, transformation and change are not synonymous. Some people use them, the terms, synonymously, but they’re not. Anything that changes can change back. When something is transformed, it cannot change back, it cannot. It will not because it has gone through a process that will not allow it to reverse. And I think that is the focus we’re looking at. So, for us to achieve that, innovation and creativity must be brought sharply into focus which we’re going to do that,” Dr Hutson said.