Education Ministry’s GECEP programme concludes after 3 years

…sees major improvements in hinterland schools

The Education Ministry formally announced the conclusion of the Guyana Early Childhood Education Project (GECEP) on Wednesday, which was completed after three years of work in riverine and hinterland regions.
Among those in attendance were First Lady Sandra Granger; Chief Education Officer, Marcel Hutson; World Bank representative, Hongyu Yang; Global Partnership for Education representative, Daisuke Kanazawa, students and educators.
Over 8000 persons were involved in the training and interaction between teachers, parents and students at the nursery and Grade One levels to develop the techniques in which education is being delivered.
The project was funded with US$1.7 million and the sessions focused primarily in literacy and numeracy interventions which saw significant improvements.
Project Coordinator, Quenita Waldrond-Lewis gave insight into the developments that were observed which recorded a 91 percentage change in literacy and a 95 percentage change for numeracy in the hinterland schools between the period of September 2015 to June 2017.
Meanwhile, from September 2016 to June 2018, records show a positive change of 139 per cent in literacy and 133 per cent change in numeracy.
These numbers show improvements in the students’ ability to successfully complete tasks that are essential at their academic level.
On the other hand, educators across these areas were taught to change the methods which are used to share information and conduct classroom demonstrations.
“We did not pull them away from their Indigenous teaching environments because we wanted the training to be tailor-made for their individual circumstances and the nuances of their educational spaces like we took the training to them at their sub-regional level,” said Waldrond-Lewis. Remarks were shared by Education Minister Nicolette Henry who noted that the supplies which can be used to modify the standard teaching techniques were the main tools used throughout the training and there are plans to supply these to the coastal region.
“Positive actions have solidified their place for national scale up. I would want to speak of early childhood resource tool kits which have been purchased and will be delivered in the coming weeks to all nursery schools in the coastland regions.”
Monitoring of these classrooms was ongoing for the last 36 months and are expected to continue so as to see how schools are performing and the ways in which classroom skills are evolving.
The representative for Global Partnership for Education has informed that US$1.3 million is in the pipeline for another such initiative which is expected to further develop the education sector.