Opposition Leader Dr Peter Phillips says the education system needs to be overhauled to ensure that students at all levels are exposed to the best opportunity to excel.

Speaking at a fundraising event in Clarendon North Central on the weekend, Dr Phillips said from early childhood through to tertiary, every Jamaican child must be provided with full access to a good education.

He said it is clear that the Ministry of Education does not know what it is doing, and this shows up very clearly in relation to the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) introduced by the ministry to replace GSAT.

“Parents rightly feel that their children are being used as guinea pigs in a programme that has been inadequately prepared which condemns them to failure from the start,” Dr Phillips said.

“Of the 37,500 students who sat the mock examination in June, only 583 (1 ½ per cent) were deemed by the examiners to have mastered the subjects to the requirement of PEP.”

Describing the secondary education system as virtual apartheid which discriminates against the majority, the opposition leader said there is one learning environment for the traditional high schools and those students’ average pass rate is five subjects.

But …“In the non-traditional schools, which the majority attended, it is a totally different learning environment and those students only average two subjects. Worse, thousands of students attend schools for more than four years without passing a single subject and are left totally unprepared for the world of work or for further study. These young Jamaicans are at risk and vulnerable to a life of crime,” he said.

Dr Phillips promised that the next People’s National Party (PNP) Government will establish the same learning environment in all secondary schools islandwide so that all students will have equal access to quality education.

Regarding the recent announcement that 800 new students of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus were facing deregistration for failing to pay their tuition fees, the opposition leader said the next PNP Government is going to ensure that tertiary education is affordable.

“Under the next PNP Government, we will ensure that the repayment of student loans only begin when the student is employed and it is capped to a percentage of income,” he told his audience.

He said parents at all levels are already burdened with the massive increases in the cost of living which came with the $31-billion tax package last year and can hardly cope with the cost of educating their children.