Nursery children benefiting from government’s school feeding programme
Education is recognised as one of the most fundamental building blocks of human development and is one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty, improving health, gender equality, peace and stability.
Government’s heavy investments in the sector have been bearing fruit and this is evident by the encouraging results at the Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) over the years.
Spending in the sector has increased to allow for the construction and rehabilitation of schools across the country.
These include Lower Kaituma Primary, Mabaruma Primary, CV Nunes Primary, Sparta Primary, Hampton Court Primary, Windsor Forest Primary, De Hoop Primary, Cotton Field Secondary, Charity Secondary, Pomona Secondary, Greenwich Park Secondary, Hope Secondary, Diamond Secondary, Waramadong Secondary, Mahdia Secondary, Linden Foundation Secondary and the Wismar/Christianburg Secondary schools.
To further enhance the delivery of education, government continues to invest in teacher training and a US$4.2 million Guyana Improvement Teacher Education Project was initiated.
Secondary students at their school’s computer laboratory
Approximately Gy$200 million was budgeted in 2011 towards this programme while a further; Gy$919 million has also been budgeted for teacher training with the aim of achieving the medium-term target of 70 per cent trained teachers in the school system by 2013. The 2008-2013 Education Strategic Plan is the fourth in a series of plans during the last two decades, to identify priority policies and strategies the education system needs to pursue in order to significantly improve the quality of its output.
The priority areas of the plan are quality education, universal secondary education, teacher education, technical and vocational education, inclusive education, school health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS, and monitoring and evaluation, a GINA release said.
One of the major initiatives in the education sector this year is the focus on harnessing Information Communication and Technology (ICT), to aid the delivery of quality education.
To date, this project has incurred Gy$147 million in preparatory costs while Gy$56 million has been budgeted for its operations in 2011.
Work has commenced to have computerised laboratories in all secondary schools while primary schools will benefit from a similar initiative.
To complement this initiative, the first ever education television broadcasting service – Learning Channel has come on stream.
As efforts continue to improve access to education in Guyana, the administration has embarked on several initiatives including the school uniform programme.
About 200,000 vulnerable families, 30,000 of which are Amerindians from rural, riveraine and hinterland areas have benefited from the Gy$30 million programme. Cognizant of the fact that good nutrition plays an important role in improving the concentration of students at school, Gy$710 million was allocated in 2009 and Gy$800 million in 2010 on a nationwide school feeding programme.
Over 100 primary schools in Regions One, Eight and Nine benefited from the programme which was initially introduced as part of a poverty eradication project targeting poor families. Both the school feeding and uniform programmes have contributed to an increase in students’ attendance.
Meanwhile, the poor performing students, particularly in mathematics and English at the National Grade Six Assessment and the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificates examinations have been a major concern for the Education Ministry.
In an effort to address this problem, the ministry has initiated remediation programmes during the July/August holidays targeting grades two, three and four pupils at the primary level and grades seven and eight students at secondary schools.
