Our educational system should be declared a disaster zone

Jan 24, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Each year our national Budget keeps getting larger. This is not peculiar to PPPC Governments. It has also occurred under the APNU+AFC Government. For example in the Budget speech for 2015, a Budget of $192.1B was proposed; for 2016 the corresponding figure was G$223.3B; and by 2019 this had increased to G$291B.

The actual expenditures tend to vary upwards and downwards from these numbers. But it has been the pattern that each year’s Budget surpasses that of the previous year.

Over the past two years, there has been a steep hike in the country’s overall Budget with increases average in excess of 40%. But the mere fact that more money is being spent does not automatically translate into reductions of poverty. Indeed, as was explained in an earlier column, as a country graduates from low income to middle income status, the poverty line adjust upwards. The incidence of poverty may therefore increase despite increased expenditures.|

The 2023 Budget has been criticized by the Opposition for not containing measures to attenuate, alleviate or eradicate poverty. One of the arguments countering this proposition is that the Government is spending more, including on social services such as education and health, and this is bound to have a positive impact on poverty. It is a most ridiculous counter argument.

The mere increase in spending does not necessarily translate to improvements. Indeed for years now, the annual allocations to the education sector has increased. Yet there has been little improvement in the metrics used to measure students’ performance – passes at the NGSA and CSEC examinations.

Half of the students sitting the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) and the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations have failed to pass these examinations. Despite the increasing injections of expenditure into the education sector, the system is producing failures at both the primary-leaving and secondary leaving examinations.

Did you know that at the National Grade 2 Assessment, only 45% of our students are securing passes in English and only 49% at mathematics? Did you know two years onwards, at the Grade 4 level, there tends to be a decline in performance with only 37% passing mathematics? And by the time these students get to Grade 6, half of them will fail the National Grade Six Assessment. And at the CSEC level, only slightly more than one in every three students were leaving school with five or more subjects, including Mathematics and English. No wonder youth employment is high – the education system is failing our young people.

Outside of examination passes, a deep-seated crisis exists. The Education Sector Plan 2021-2025 paints a dismal picture of national education.

For example, the majority of our students are not completing their secondary education. Only about 42% of a cohort is completing the final grade in primary-tops schools – a primary school with a secondary department up to Grade 9. In the general secondary schools, only half of the students of any given cohort will survive. This in itself should have elicited a declaration of emergency in education.

The World Bank has said that tertiary education has poor returns in Guyana. It has noted that about half of our university graduates migrate to the United State. Yet, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo insists on free university education at the University of Guyana by 2025, despite the government having an impressive programme called the Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) which has the potential to ensure universal access to tertiary education and is a much better investment that sinking monies into free education at the University of Guyana.

According to the World Bank while students in Guyana receive 12 years of schooling, because of the poor quality of the education, the learning is only equivalent to 6.7 years of education in top-performing education systems. In other words, we are graduating students with a sub-standard education relative to international standards.

Contributing to this dismal state of affairs is the large number of untrained teachers. A quarter of the teachers in Guyana’s education system are untrained, a fact which has been acknowledged by local educational officials.

The education system in Guyana therefore is in deep crisis. Throwing more resources at the sector without proper policies aimed at narrowing the numerous gaps, including those that impact on poverty, is not a workable solution.

There must an honest acceptance that education is now a national disaster and no amount of photo-ops is going to fix it. Only sound policies will do this.

The education sector needs a revamp. It is crying out for new vision, new thinking and new initiatives. And that, unfortunately, can only come about if there is a complete overall of the leadership within the system.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

• APNU+AFC Government, disaster zone, educational system, Peeping Tom, PPPC Governments