Williams eyes improved performance as school year begins
Published:Monday | September 5, 2022 | 12:08 AM
Education Minister Fayval Williams says the Government will focus on implementing the recommendations of the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission during the new academic year, which starts today.
Recommendations were made public during the launch of the report authored by the Professor Orlando Patterson commission in January.
The Education Transformation Oversight Committee was also established in March to monitor execution.
“As you know, if we don’t implement the recommendations, we cannot expect to see different results,” Williams said in her address to the nation aired on television Sunday evening.
Williams argued that the public debate should remain on the quality of education and how the sector could extract higher performance among the student population.
The Patterson report flagged troubling deficits in numeracy and literacy capacity among students and proposed an overhaul of sector structures, including the framework of education officers, which was viewed as inefficient.
Among other areas placed under the spotlight were school boards, with the team contending that there were “major problems” with how members are selected; the need for financial management, including frequent auditing of schools; and the passing of legislation such as the Jamaica Teaching Council bill and the Tertiary Education Commission bill.
Despite anxiety over the number of teachers available as well as the Sixth Form Pathways Programme, Williams is optimistic that the 2022-23 academic year will be successful.
Williams welcomes the first full-scale academic year roll-out of schools since 2019 - a period blanketed by the dark clouds of COVID-19 restrictions and staggering levels of learning loss.
The Ministry of Education and Youth has procured more devices for students and teachers entering this school year, with 8,469 teachers, representing 95 per cent of primary-school faculty, now having laptops.
Williams said there is focus now on similarly providing laptops for teachers in high schools as the Government seeks to encourage the use of technology in learning.
“Our efforts to have all our schools equipped with adequate Internet connectivity are under way, and already, many of our schools have been connected,” she said.
Teacher vacancies
On the matter of teacher vacancies, Williams re-emphasised the Ministry of Education and Youth’s initiatives to help close those gaps.
Approximately 250 teachers have resigned since the summer holidays, but the Government has indicated that many of those openings should be filled by the more than 960 graduates from the island’s teachers’ colleges.
“Yes, there have been resignations of some teachers at the start of this new school year. However, many of our schools have reported that they filled the vacancies or are wrapping up on interviews,” Williams said in her national address.
“We will continue to work with our school boards and principals. We would’ve communicated many strategies to use, including engaging our retired teachers, especially for those hard-to-fill areas such as geography, history, physics, and other subject areas,” she added.
There were also 1,877 teachers off on vacation leave, retirement, or study leave as of September 1, 2022.
Teachers in overstaffed schools have been encouraged by the minister to apply for voluntary relocation to an institution in need of teachers.