Universal Primary Education

Jan 08, 2009 Editorial

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2000, in an effort to help developing countries improve their peoples’ livelihoods, established benchmarks in eight core areas that had to be met by 2015. Even though governments committed themselves to assist less fortunate countries in achieving their goals, the primary responsibility remained with the individual governments.
These “Millennium Development Goals” are to: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 2. Achieve universal primary education 3. Promote gender equality and empower women 4. Reduce child mortality 5. Improve maternal health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases 7. Achieve environmental sustainability 8. Develop a global partnership for development.
Of the eight goals, Guyana has made the greatest progress in the delivery of primary education and indeed, is in the enviable position of already having achieved the millennium target. There is not a child in Guyana who cannot access Primary Education and we in Guyana ought to be justifiably proud: Guyana, after all is still a very poor country compared with many other countries that are a far way from hitting the target.
Starting from a base in which the educational system had been reduced to shambles, it must be conceded by even its sharpest critics that the present administration has from the onset focused commendably on education in general and primary education in particular.
The physical infrastructure has been completely rehabilitated in almost every nook and cranny of the land. With our extremely vast land mass in comparison to our population size, this is not an inconsiderable achievement. It is a direct result of the fact that in every budget since 1992, the percentage of expenditure allocated to education has remained higher than that of most of our Caricom partners.
Because of the unique nature of our coastal settlement pattern, the improvement of our school buildings is directly apprehended to anyone traversing our major public road from Charity to Crabwood Creek. Not as easily appreciated is the equal expenditure allocated to our hinterland schools that have brought them up to par with their coastal counterparts. This has truly been a revolution that has transformed schooling in our interior.
The improvement in the delivery of primary education has not been limited to buildings: there has been as commendable a focus on the training of teachers. Branches of the Teachers Training College have been established in the outlying regions and a steady stream of trained teachers are delivering the very comprehensive curriculum to the students.
At this time, while the situation can be improved, Guyana has the highest ratio of trained teachers to students than at any period of its history. It is an unfortunate happenstance that even though the salaries of our teachers have increased exponentially since 1992, those increases have to be circumscribed within our still constrained economy.
The result has been a depressingly sustained exodus of our trained teachers to greener financial pastures. Most unfortunate has been the departure of teachers who received Ministry’s permission to further their education at UG at great disruption to their assigned schools.
Very commendable also has been the extensive and expanding programme of providing school uniforms to students with limited financial resources. The continuation of the programme to provide free school books also furthers the effective delivery of the primary school curriculum.
Constant monitoring of that delivery has led to the introduction of a continuous evaluation programme in the primary schools facilitated by assessment programmes at Grades 2, 4, and 6. Feedback from these programmes recently led to a $115 M ‘Fast Track Initiative Literacy Programme’ targeting low performing primary six students and young adults. The success in the delivery of the Ministry’s Primary School programme can be seen in the better results delivered from its schools than even from the high-paying private schools that have sprouted for the elites. This success is evident in even schools located in the rural areas that used to be low achievers.
That success has even delivered to the Ministry the happy provenance of deciding how to deal with “high flyers” that the system is now producing: students who can deliver beyond the normal expectations, as highlighted in this newspaper.
As we begin this New Year, let us be positive and resolve to build on the Ministry of Education’s success in the delivery of universal primary education.

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Universal Primary Education

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Universal Primary Education

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