Education Month: Illiteracy, modernisation of education sector to be addressed in strategic plan

The Education Ministry on Wednesday launched a five-year (2021-2025) education strategic sector plan which is expected to address issues of school-dropouts and inequities in education, as well as improving performance at all levels and boosting the overall efficiency of the education system.
The plan outlines how stakeholders can strengthen human resources development, ensure children at all school levels demonstrate the required skills at the end of the school cycle, reduce school dropouts, and ensure all learners are employable in their area of study.
With September 1 marking the beginning of Education Month 2021, which is being observed under the theme: “Education for all; innovative teaching and learning in a global pandemic”, it was made known that the launch of the plan yesterday was no coincidence.
Further, the plan will examine issues not just generally, but in detail based on geographical location, age and gender.
During the launch of the plan, Chief Planning Officer of the Education Ministry, Nicola Johnson provided an overview of some priorities of the strategic plan.
These are to improve governance and accountability, improve performance at all levels, improve efficiency of the education system, reduce inequalities in education, and contribute to lifelong learning and employability.
“The development of this plan started with a thorough education sector analysis…our target as a sector is to ensure the management at the central and regional school level is strengthened by 2025,” the Chief Planning Officer stated.
Meanwhile, Education Minister Priya Manickchand, in her feature address, spoke of the non-coincidence of the launch of the education strategic sector plan being done at the beginning of Education Month.
“We decided that we were going to kick off Education Month with the thing that was going to be most meaningful to the sector,” the Minister stated.
She also made reference to a 1992 report provided by the World Bank on Guyana’s situation with regard to education.
“In that report came a list of measures and recommendations that should have been taken to turn around that particular picture… one of which was that there must be an urgent crafting of a strategic plan, a sector plan, so that the Ministry itself, the Government, all of its stakeholders…can all be on the same page about where we were, where we wanted to go, and where we were going to get there,” Manickchand said.
And, according to the Minister, the country has come a long way from that period in improving the education sector.
“We can say in this country that we moved parameters, that we improved on teacher training and physical infrastructure and the provision of resources and we can say evidentially that we have turned that situation around, but nowhere near to perfection. So, there’s still much work to be done.”
The 2030 vision for education is “Providing opportunities for quality equitable education and life-long learning for all”
The ultimate goal of the plan is expected to contribute to employability and reduction of poverty by increasing performance at all levels and reducing the disparity of all subgroups.