Strategic tactic in place to guard against shoddy work – Education Minister

Apr 22, 2014 News

With a keen intent on getting value for money, the Ministry of Education has put in place a strategic policy which is designed to garner community support in the quest to achieve value for money.
This notion was recently amplified by Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, as she addressed the National Assembly during the recent budget debate.

Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand

According to Manickchand, the strategic move is one which will see Ministry officials venturing into communities in which there are plans to undertake education infrastructural work.
“Every time we are going to expand infrastructure, build new schools, we are going to go out, take all our documents with us and have community meetings with all those who will come. Particularly, we would invite parent-teacher associations (PTAs), staff, parents, students, the Regional Democratic Councils (RDCs), the Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) and we will leave with them documents so that they can keep a close eye on what is happening in schools so that we can have quality work,” said the Education Minister.
This move, she said, is seen as important in light of the fact that the Ministry has, in the past, been the beneficiary of works that are less than desirable.
“We recognise that sometimes we get shoddy work…That does not mean that all contractors give us shoddy work but we have been robbed; the country has been robbed a couple of times and we want to make sure that when we do things we get value for money,” asserted Manickchand.
The Ministry is also working towards forging greater collaboration with its stakeholders through the introduction of a website. And according to the Minister there are plans apace to launch the website shortly which will be interactive and offer all visitors education documents, policies, textbooks and even past exam papers.
“It is going to have a feature that will allow children to answer exam papers and then we send them an email with what results they got – what was right and what was wrong,” disclosed the Minister.
This feature, according to her, will cater to children at the levels of Grades One through Six and students from secondary schools will eventually be included too.
Already the Ministry has in place a Live Chat internet forum, which stakeholders could access at www.education.gov.gy every Thursday between the hours of 19:30 hours and 21:00 hours, to interact with the Minister herself or senior officials about issues of concern.
The introduction of the forum was premised on the recognition that there were a number of concerns within the education system, some of which were not gaining the attention of the relevant officials within Central Ministry in a timely manner.
With the introduction of this avenue it is expected that information will reach senior officials at a much faster rate than was obtained in the past.
It is therefore expected that such interactions will lend to the education sector operating even more efficiently.
Stakeholders could interact with the officials via the Ministry’s Facebook page. “These are all things that we have done to make sure that we can hear from the people we serve, so that we can serve them better. These are things that we have done to make sure that we can get our messages out, get our information out there,” said the Minister.
She added that the Ministry has been on a continued focused mission to ‘fine-tune’ its partnership with parents and other stakeholders since according to her, “we are absolutely sure that students in our care will not have as much and be as much as they can be except there is parental or home involvement.”
The Minister was at pains to highlight that “all the children who have done well we can trace it back to a few things, a good school system, sound investment in the education sector and involvement of their families and not necessarily wealth families…”