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Final report on education system COI submitted to Ministry
COI Chairman, Mr. Ed Caesar
The final report detailing the findings of the Commission of Inquiry [COI] into the public education system has been handed over to the Ministry of Education. This long anticipated development, which comes close to one year after a preliminary report was presented to the Ministry, was yesterday confirmed by senior officials within the Public Relations Department of the Education Ministry.
Key Ministry officials will now be tasked with thoroughly examining the content of the report before it can be officially unveiled.
According to reports reaching this newspaper, the report was on Wednesday submitted by the COI Chairman, former Chief Education Officer, Mr. Ed Caesar.
Caesar had in April of last year, handed over the preliminary report of the findings to former Minister of Education, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine. At that time, Caesar had informed that the final report would have been completed within a few weeks. However, from all indication unforeseen circumstances resulted in its delayed completion.
Based on Caesar’s earlier disclosure, the final report is expected to entail recommendations on issues such as technical education, special needs education and information technology. Addressing the importance of Technical Vocational Education and Training [TVET], Caesar said, “We really have to do some work to get TVET the way that it is supposed to be. Let it not be regarded as an area for students who are not capable, academically. We must see this as a very important area.”
He also stressed the need for focus on Information Communication Technology [ICT]. This is in light of his belief that this is an important medium through which many things should be done. “If we are going to push our education sector forward, ICT has to play a major, major role and we can’t just speak about ICT in schools,” said Caesar.
He continued, “We have to find a way to involve parents and community members. So one of the things that they have been suggesting is that in communities, cluster groups must be formed and training must be done with parents to use ICTs in their regular life.”
Commenting on the issue of special needs education, Caesar said, “We have not, to my mind, been allowing our brothers and sisters to develop in spite of their several deficiencies. The Commission would like to see places like David Rose School for the Handicapped, the special schools in Linden, New Amsterdam and so on, that all of them be given a new lease of life, but we have got to identify areas where they can be appropriately trained.”
As it relates to special needs education, Caesar said that based on the recently completed inquiry, the Guyana Society for the Blind needs to be especially addressed.
“For example, there are students who are going there who are attending the University of Guyana. We must find a way to provide facilities for them, provide equipment for them, like computers and so on,” he asserted.
He added, “They must not be left out because if we do not work with our special needs people it is going to be a cost to the government and the country because we will have to maintain them when we could have made them employable.”
“There will be a lot of things coming out in the final report that will be of interest to the public,” said Caesar, even as he asserted that there have not been all bad things happening in the education system.
He disclosed that all past Ministers of Education have made significant contributions to the development of the public education system.
“It must never be said that the sector was at a point where nothing was happening…I am presumptuous enough to say the administration of former Minister [Shaik] Baksh and Sister Priya Manickchand did contribute to the development of education in several ways. We must recognise things like that,” said Caesar.
He nevertheless noted that, there have been some aspects of education that had long required some measure of intervention in order to improve the sector.
He had also shared his conviction that even the immediate past Minister, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine, will go down in history as being “the Minister who wanted to understand the status of education in the sector from the good things that have been happening to the bad things so as to get a sense of how to move forward so that whatever is done in education is informed by evidential data.”
“That really was the remit of the COI to ascertain what has been happening; to ascertain where we are and wherever possible make recommendations for the improvement in the sector,” Caesar said.
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