McConney: Education system must be reformed or fail

Minister of Education Kay McConney has cautioned reform naysayers that the education system has outlived its purpose in its present form and must be changed now to stop some students from being left behind and becoming apathetic to their country.

As the Budget debate continued on Wednesday, she said that while the current system has turned out some of the best tradesmen and academics over time, some may have fallen through the cracks because of the policies and curricula that had not been tailored for them. 

The St Philip West Member of Parliament said technical and vocational skills are in greater demand globally, and Barbados’ classroom must reflect this reality.

“We have to build on the education system that we already have. We cannot throw away everything. There are some things we will keep. There are some things that we will introduce for the first time, and there are some things that we will have to change in significant ways,” she said.

“The intention is that when we are all done, we would create a Barbados where all people feel as if there is a place in this society, in the school system, for them. The day that we continue to allow our system to leave people behind, we are going to find that it is to the detriment, not of the people left behind, but the entire country because we must all live together.”

The minister said that while the Common Entrance Examination has served some students well, four out of every ten children score below 50 per cent in Mathematics; in English, one of every five falls below the 50 per cent mark.

“How do we continue a system in the same way that is leaving 40 per cent or more of this population behind?” McConney asked.

In reiterating her case for education reform, the minister also told the Chamber that between 2010 and 2022, 11 per cent of students (7 082) left school without a single certificate. 

“Can we continue for this system to work in that way?” the minister asked.

Responding directly to the warning from Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne on Tuesday that education must not be “touched” unless the changes are to the curriculum, McConney said it is for this reason that curriculum transformation is one of the central pillars of the transformation proposal.

“Curriculum cannot be done alone. If you touch the curriculum, you then have to touch teachers because they have to be trained to be able to deliver the new curriculum. And the schools have to be touched…This notion that you can pull out a piece of education and tinker with the specifics of the syllabus and then shift resources…this pull, tinker, shift is what has gotten us here,” she added.

McConney said the hands-off approach to education is the reason Barbados is now battling with a sick school plant that is not fit for purpose. She said the current administration is moving to implement a new, comprehensive maintenance plan to take the education system into the future. 

“We need now to look at new models. We need to think of what the classroom of tomorrow looks like and how do we now make sure that we are able to attend to this,” the education minister said. 

(SP)