FACELIFT

PM announces millions in upgrades for schools across island By Jenique Belgrave Government has committed an initial $15 million to begin to improve the physical infrastructure of public schools, Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced on Monday. She also disclosed that over the next few years, students leaving secondary school will get additional educational support. “Our Government has determined that all of the schools must receive facelifts over the next few years. The first thing we did at the end of the last financial year when we had a little extra that we didn’t expect, we sent it to education,” the Prime Minister said at the opening ceremony of the Caribbean Association of Principals of Secondary Schools’ 29th Biennial Conference, adding that $15 million will go to starting the improvement “and we will keep building on that”. Mottley contended that the current design of the island’s schools reflects preparation for an industrial age that is “long gone”. “We need schools that reflect good infrastructure. It must not only be rich people’s children that know what it is to have a wonderful garden in the middle of school, for who has been responsible for doing more gardening than ordinary people? It must not only be schools that are well endowed, that are clean. And [we must remove] this notion of World Bank schools…schools that are dark, dreary, dismal and damp, that from the teachers back to the students don’t feel a sense of pride when walking in,” she said. Prime Minister Mottley said the Ministry of Education is also expected to start a programme within various communities to have residents help beautify schools within their areas. She told the audience at the Accra Beach Hotel that information gathered by the ministry at the beginning of the 2022/2023 school year had identified gaps created by the COVID-19 pandemic and said that secondary school leavers will be receiving additional educational support over the next few years. “It is clear to me that there’s going to have to be a parallel action for many of the kids who are leaving school this year, next year, and the year after, to reinforce and to supplement that which they did not get in the last few years. And that’s great because adult education and the capacity to continuously learn must always be a feature of our systems. “The problem is that education is not just about learning knowledge. It is about preparing the mind, it’s about values, it’s about learning to work and live with each other, and those are going to be the challenges that are going to have to be addressed in our society, not through education in the formal sense, but it’s going to have to be addressed through our clubs, sporting clubs, our community clubs and organisations. And that’s why our Government has committed to putting $1 million particularly to get our sporting clubs because if you think others suffered during COVID, anything that was vaguely social or cultural got licked up completely,” the Prime Minister said. Highlighting the impact of gunplay and violence in societies, Mottley said the only way to conquer weapons of mass destruction was with tools of mass empowerment, mainly education. She noted that redeveloping the educational system is not only a role for the ministry but it must be a national endeavour. In her remarks, Chief Education Officer Dr Ramona Archer-Bradshaw pointed to the importance of having the best teachers within the revamped system, advising principals that it was critical to ensure these professionals are retained. “During this process of reimagining our various education systems in the quest to get better outcomes for our students, it would be remiss of me not to highlight the crucial role of teacher quality in improving student outcomes. As principals of secondary schools, you must do all in your power to ensure that teachers of the highest calibre are not only recruited but that they are retained in our schools,” she said. The education chief said such teachers would assist students in developing 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication. jeniquebelgrave@barbadostoday.bb]]>