ROSE HALL, St James — Citing inadequate pay for practitioners and insufficient resources for schools, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) has blasted the Government for what it says is its poor handling of the early childhood education sector.

“I have heard what the ministry has said and what it has done and what it is doing and perhaps what it plans to do in the future. But I would have to say, with all due respect, that that is not enough,” stated JTA Secretary General Dr Mark Nicely. “It is wicked, dreadful and unreasonable what we are doing to the early childhood sector, the children and the practitioners involved.”

He was addressing the first day of an Early Childhood Education Conference being held at the Holiday Inn Resort, Rose Hall, St James, from December 18-20.

“Currently, the persons who operate in the sector and are funded through the Early Childhood Commission get a maximum monthly of just under $30,000 and I have heard the argument to say that they are not practitioners. They are not qualified. Really? But they are in charge of our children, the nation’s children. At the youngest, at the tender and most vulnerable stage of their lives,” Nicely groused.

“I’m going to be frank. When the minister of education is allocating resources — IT [information technology], computers, laptops, etc — they don’t give any to Ms Matty’s Basic School. But Ms Matty’s Basic School has in its care the majority of the nation’s children,” he argued.

Nicely is urging Jamaicans to wake up to what is happening in the sector.

“I am using this opportunity to say to Jamaica, let us stop putting lip service to the foundation of early childhood education. We have gone on for too long. We have been hypocritical and you know what is ironic, we all benefited from early childhood education,” he said.

“I still remember my earlier days in early childhood education. It is where many of us biological systems fall apart and we have to be cleaned off. That is where it happened. That is where they are showing. That is where the nurturing, that is where the busy parent let off the child and never picked them up until late in those formative years,” Nicely continued.

Weighing in on the issue, JTA President Leighton Johnson pointed out that educators who are paid by the ECC are not pensionable. He said the JTA will continue advocating for this to change.

In stark contrast to the comments from the JTA officials, Early Childhood Commission Acting Communications Manager Sophia Stewart told the gathering that early childhood education has remained a priority for the ministry over the past 10 years.

She noted that before the publication of the 2021 Jamaica Education Transformation Commission reports, which had several recommendations for the development of the sector, the ministry, as a part of wider government policy, had implemented several initiatives and invested billions of dollars towards improvements in the sector.

The conference, which cost approximately $5 million to host, was held under the theme ‘The Right Start: Prioritising Early Childhood Education’.