Jessie Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jessie.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

From next week, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion will be rolling out its “Edu Talk Se­ries”, the fi­nal chap­ter of a three-phase con­sul­ta­tion process which be­gan in 2020.

The pur­pose of the week-long ex­er­cise, ac­cord­ing to Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly, is to ven­ti­late rec­om­men­da­tions sub­mit­ted to the min­istry tar­get­ed at trans­form­ing ed­u­ca­tion over the next five years.

Speak­ing at a me­dia con­fer­ence on Fri­day, the min­is­ter said the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the 2023-2027 ed­u­ca­tion pol­i­cy ze­roed in on the chal­lenges fac­ing the ed­u­ca­tion land­scape, in­clud­ing tran­si­tion­ing learn­ers through the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

She said, “The ini­tia­tives out­lined in the ed­u­ca­tion pol­i­cy 2023-2027 al­so dove­tail with rec­om­men­da­tions of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) and con­cor­dat com­mit­tee which in­di­cat­ed that a dras­tic change in the for­mat used to ef­fect tran­si­tion from pri­ma­ry to sec­ondary school would like­ly re­sult in neg­a­tive un­in­tend­ed con­se­quences with­out re­form of the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem to in­crease ho­mo­gene­ity of ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ences across pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools.”

In 2021, the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter not­ed that the 20-mem­ber com­mit­tee’s re­port will form part of the ed­u­ca­tion pol­i­cy.

Gads­by-Dol­ly said the rec­om­mend­ed changes should re­sult in qual­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion be­ing achieved in any school, whether de­nom­i­na­tion­al or gov­ern­ment.
She said ed­u­ca­tion eq­ui­ty is para­mount.

“No mat­ter where a stu­dent goes to school, they can re­ceive a qual­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion and that there are stan­dards that would ap­ply to what every stu­dent should be ex­posed to be­cause what is ex­pressed in the re­port is that even if we move to dif­fer­ent sys­tems that have been tried in dif­fer­ent ed­u­ca­tion­al ju­ris­dic­tions, there are in­her­ent con­se­quences that may serve to con­cen­trate stu­dents now more based on ge­og­ra­phy, the type of school they at­tend and it will not give us the re­sult we are look­ing for,” she said.

Gads­by-Dol­ly al­so not­ed that the over­ar­ch­ing pol­i­cy will be sup­port­ed by sub-poli­cies, in­clud­ing cul­tur­al trans­for­ma­tion, home school­ing and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, among oth­ers.

She said while school in­fra­struc­ture and vi­o­lence dom­i­nat­ed the news cy­cle, fur­ther checks should go in­to oth­er root­ed prob­lems im­pact­ing the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

The min­is­ter said, “When stu­dents are as­sured qual­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion wher­ev­er they are, it will re­move this com­pe­ti­tion and this need to get stu­dents in­to a par­tic­u­lar school if they are to do well. That is at the ba­sis of queries that come with SEA and that is where we fo­cus­ing the at­ten­tion first deal­ing with what is of­fered across the board of all our schools.”