KINGSTON, Jamaica – Grades one to three students at the primary level will soon begin to benefit from at least two hours of timetabled reading each week.

Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, Senator Dana Morris Dixon, said literacy and numeracy are foundational and she is pleased that reading will now be a timetabled subject.

“That’s a big thing. Many people wouldn’t even realise that it wasn’t timetabled, but now it is timetabled, because we are serious about stemming this literacy challenge that we have in our schools,” Morris Dixon said.

She was addressing Friday’s Education Transformation Oversight Committee (ETOC) press conference, held at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Regional Headquarters in St Andrew.

Meanwhile, Permanent Secretary, Kasan Troupe, underscored that it is critical to institute the teaching of reading.

“We understand the issue of literacy in our country and rather than relying on an integrated approach, in this new framework reading will be taught. Every single class will be timetabled for reading, and that will mean that all our teachers will be teaching reading,” Troupe said.

She advised that the ministry will be rolling out a massive training programme during this quarter to build the skillsets of teachers and to retool them to deliver the reading curriculum.

“We’ll be focusing on literacy, reading for fluency, reading for vocabulary building and we will be looking at reading for enjoyment and word recognition,” Troupe added.

In the meantime, Morris Dixon reiterated that the leadership of the ministry is seized of the problems in the education system and is committed to fixing them.

“Every single child in Jamaica matters and every single child deserves quality education like they have in Denmark, like they have in Singapore, and that’s what our commitment is to the children of Jamaica,” she said.

–         JIS