Dear Editor,

At the recently held People’s National Party (PNP) annual conference, on Sunday September 22, 2019, Dr Peter Phillips promised that the PNP “if it forms the Government after the next election, will establish an “Institute for Excellence in Education”. Among its main functions include: “Leadership training for principals.” (See RJR94FM News).

The PNP spokesperson for education should have informed the Opposition leader that there already exists a functional National College for Educational Leadership (NCEL), established since 2011, as an agency of the modernised Ministry of Education’s Education System Transformation Programme (ESTP), with the mandate to develop excellent leadership in Jamaica’s education system.

At the 2016/2017 LASCO teacher and principal of the year awards ceremony, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said that, “The idea behind NCEL was to create a staff college where persons who were existing school leaders and persons who… aspire to be school leaders had practical hands-on experiences of the standard operating procedures that the Ministry of Education had certified.” ( Jamaica Observer November 30, 2016)

The Gleaner of June 11, 2017 also highlighted why NCEL was established: “The competencies now demanded for effective school leadership include the ability to set vision and strategise, lead the change agenda, engage in systems thinking, demonstrate a sense of service and community, work collaboratively in teams, and display ethics and integrity.”

Clearly our Members of Parliament, especially those who have been involved at the Cabinet level of political administrations, have kept displaying knowledge gap in policies for the development of the nation, as the foundational work and implementation of NCEL would have been under the leadership of Portia L Simpson Miller, prime minister between 2012-2016. There is no need to reinvent the wheel of leadership training for principals.

Dudley C McLean II

Mandeville, Manchester

dm15094@gmail.com