Education has been receiving the largest chunk of the National Budget for decades. This year .3 billion will be spent in this sector, representing 17 per cent of the Budget but very few citizens would venture to say they are satisfied with the results produced by the education system.
This dissatisfaction in not new and over the past decades there have been a slew of inquiries and investigations out of which copious reports were produced and presented to the authorities. To be fair, several programmes emanated from these inquiries and were deployed to rectify the identified shortcomings so it is obvious there are factors missed either in the analyses and/or implementations.
During its campaign for office, the APNU/AFC coalition placed great emphasis on the need for “educational reform” and pledged to place this imperative on the front burner if they were to attain office. When this was achieved, the new Minister of Education Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, reaffirmed his ministry’s commitment to educational reform, but insisted an “audit” of the sector was needed to form a baseline for reform.
This audit took two months and was completed in early August 2015, when the Minister then said a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) was now necessary and the results of the audits would be filtered into that body. This CoI would last four months and would “refresh the Education Sector Strategic Plan” after looking at the functioning of education between 2010 and 2014.
The hearings of this CoI were finally launched last Friday and the public turnout could only be described as “paltry”. One possible reason is that Guyanese are becoming quite cynical about the money and time expended on “audits” and “CoIs” by the government from which very little concrete action emanates.
Citizens see the proliferation of these type of activities as efforts to show that “something” is being done in areas of national life that face challenges and which are the responsibility of government. Very little is expected out of this CoI even though most citizens would agree with the statement of the Minister when he launched it, “Nothing is more important than getting the education system right.”
There have not been too many complaints about the nature of the curriculum with the exception of the need for addition of a solid “civics” component. In general, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the present education strategic plan but the problem lies with its implementation.
This can be illustrated by examining the “Assessments” introduced into the Primary Schools. It was rather disheartening that the ministry was very critical of the Assessments given at Grade 2 and Grade 4 and decided to remove their contributions to the final NGSA score at Grade 6 without waiting for its promised CoI to even begin its hearings.
The assessments at three points of the child’s progress through the Primary levels were intended to provide teachers with hard, empirical data on his/her strengths and weaknesses which would then guide those teachers in succeeding levels to work more effectively with particular children.
Who would complain there is no merit in this approach? Is not the present “cookie-cutter”, “one-size-fits-all”’ approach at the heart of the failure of the NGSA that 15,000 children write annually? 80 per cent of them effectively fail to score 50 per cent but are yet promoted to secondary school, where the teachers are not even provided with their assessments in the four areas tested?
This crucial aspect of the Assessment programme was never implemented for the simple reason there was never enough teachers deployed in the system to provide the more individualised delivery of the curriculum. It is our position that the Ministry of Education’s focus ought to be on motivating and facilitating teachers to execute programmes already present in the current Strategic Plan. The ongoing negotiations with the Guyana Teachers Union are therefore much more crucial to greater success in the delivery of our curricula as any CoI.
