Opposition Spokesperson on Finance calls for urgent action to stem education crisis
KINGSTON, Jamaica – People’s National Party (PNP) Spokesman on Finance, Julian Robinson, is calling for urgent action to stem what he has described as a crisis in the education sector.
According to a release, Robinson who was making his contribution to the Budget Debate in the Lower House on Thursday, said the “Covid pandemic has been devastating to a whole generation of students and that the report authored by Professor Orlando Patterson and his team has revealed many inconvenient and disturbing truths about the state of our education system, pre-Covid.”
“If we are honest with ourselves, none of us should be surprised by its conclusions, as the findings of the Patterson report echo the findings of previous reports. We are not short on analysis, rather, we are short on the discipline, aka political will, to see through the necessary reforms implemented,” Robinson shared.
Adding that in the 60th year of Jamaica’s Independence, the nation should not accept that half of the students who spend 10 years in the formal system of education, will “leave school illiterate and innumerate and have no employable skill.”
“It is within this context that I am disappointed not to see an allocation in the Budget to begin the process of transformation as recommended by the Patterson report,” he expressed.
“I acknowledge there will be short-, medium-, and long-term goals but we must start and start now. We, again, have studies or technical analyses to start with. We need to tackle the implementation of the Patterson Report as an urgent national priority.”
He pointed out that in last week’s sitting of Parliament, the Education Minister’s answers to questions posed on the extent of the learning loss faced by students were unconvincing and proved to be incorrect.
“I have since checked with a number of schools not just within my constituency but across the island and the feedback shows a total and complete disconnect between what the Minister reported in Parliament and the reality on the ground at the schools. The problems are much worse than reported,” the finance spokesman asserted.
He said that some schools have not done any diagnostic tests on any of the students and that many of the schools that did tests sent by the Ministry do not consider them in the true sense of being diagnostic to accurately determine the extent of a student’s learning loss.
“I am deeply worried that we lack an effective system to even estimate how many and which students require remedial education,” Robinson said.
“I want to encourage the Minister of Education to personally visit the schools, meet with the principals and get a first-hand view of what is happening at the schools. Don’t rely solely on the information from your technocrats. The worse response to a crisis is to not acknowledge the extent of the crisis.”
Robinson said that Jamaica needs to make some hard choices about priorities and resource allocations within the education sector.
“The Ministry has been promoting its 6th form Pathways Programme, for which the business case is weak. This is within a context of the Orlando Patterson Report which shows grave failings in the current system. There is no point in spending scarce resources to extend high school life by two years, when the first five years only produces 50 per cent of students with literate, numerate and with marketable skills,” he argued.
“Apart from the monetary resources, I do not believe the Ministry has the managerial capacity to successfully implement a national remedial programme while launching a 6th form programme.”
The finance spokesman has therefore proposed that the education ministry “suspend the implementation of the 6th form programme and focus all our energies on addressing the learning loss crisis.”