MONTEGO BAY, St James — President of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) Mark Malabver on Monday warned that decades of underinvestment in Jamaica’s early childhood sector are now manifesting across the wider education system as schools struggle to address learning and developmental gaps that should have been tackled in children’s earliest years.

Addressing the 7th Annual Professional Development Institute hosted by the Early Childhood Commission at the Montego Bay Convention Centre, under the theme ‘Making Rights Real: Reclaiming General Comment 7’, Malabver underscored that early childhood education remains the foundation of the country’s education system and can no longer be sidelined.

“Early childhood education sits at the very heart of the Jamaican education architecture. It is the foundation upon which every other educational outcome rests. And if we fail at the foundation, we inevitably struggle at every level thereafter,” he said.

“We continue to spend, colleagues, enormous sums of money on intervention programmes at the primary and the secondary level, because quite frankly, we were never consistently getting the foundation right. We are attempting to remediate on the back end what should have been properly developed on the front end,” he added.

According to Malabver, when children enter primary school already lagging in literacy readiness, numeracy readiness, behavioural development, speech and psychosocial maturity, the education system is immediately forced to play catch-up, with the gaps widening further by the secondary level.

“That is why strengthening early childhood education is not simply a social imperative, it is an economic imperative, it is a national development imperative,” he said, pointing to the Patterson Report as evidence of longstanding underfunding in the sector.

Malabver also rejected using education spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) as the primary benchmark for assessing Jamaica’s investment in education, saying such comparisons fail to reflect the realities facing smaller developing economies.

He criticised recent discussions sparked by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, saying the debate oversimplifies the issue.

“The JTA rejects any notion that the percentage of GDP comparisons alone provide an accurate picture of education investment. Too often we are comparing apples to oranges,” he said.

He argued that countries such as Singapore and Finland may spend similar shares of GDP on education but invest significantly more per child, particularly at the early childhood level.

“The real conversation must therefore centre on the unit cost per child and the actual level of investment reaching each child within a system,” he said.

Turning his attention to an often-championed issue, Malabver described salaries paid to many early childhood practitioners in Jamaica as unacceptable, saying those entrusted with shaping children during their most formative years are among the least compensated within the sector.

A section of the audience at the 7th Annual Professional Development Institute hosted by the Early Childhood Commission at the Montego Bay Convention Centre on Monday. (Photo: Horace Hines)