The national curriculum is being rewritten to make it more relevant in the modern work environment, says Minister of Education Kay McConney.
She made the announcement on Sunday during a community meeting at the Milton Lynch Primary School in Water Street Christ Church, organised by the Barbados Labour Party Christ Church East Central branch.
“As part of curriculum reform, we will still have our core subjects – mathematics, english language, science, and, of course, digital literacy would have to be in there too as we are living in a world powered by technology,” said McConney. “In addition to the core subjects, we are seeking to provide options – people call them electives. The other options would help expose them to some of the emerging industries and skills they would need for the world to come.”
It was not clear what those industry-led elective courses would be.
“Can we still prepare the children for a world that is very different to the world we came out of and still expect that if we prepare them the way we prepared them back then with the same subjects we prepared them with back then, they would be able to live in the real world now and in the future?” McConney queried.
“Part of what we need to do in order to help prepare them for now and in the future is to adjust some of the subjects that they learn, so that they are relevant to the real world they are living in.”
McConney said the ministry had discussions with students who complained that much of what they were learning was not relevant to the real world.
“They gave us some suggestions for the kind of things they would like to see included in their curriculum and we heard them,” she said.
The ministry is in the process of determining how best to incorporate these suggestions without overloading the curriculum, McConney told the meeting. This will involve evaluating what should be kept, what should be removed, and what else needs to be added.
In last month’s Budget speech, Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced that the September 2025 rollout of the education reform would be deferred by one year. However, she said, the ministry would proceed with non-controversial aspects of the reform, including teacher retraining, new administrative arrangements for the teaching profession, curriculum reform, school repairs and other improvements.
Mottley also said 22 master teachers would be deployed across secondary schools starting in September to elevate teaching quality and instructional standards.
Citing a report by the World Economic Forum, McConney said that for every ten children entering school in 2016, six of them would be in jobs that never existed before. This, she said, meant that the education system had to be altered to fit the changing times and retrofitted to support the needs of students.
The education minister noted that the government recently put out a call to all architects in Barbados to come up with a model of what they think a 21st-century school should look like, with regard to students with special needs, those at the nursery stage, primary school and secondary level.
Public schools across the island require serious upgrades to facilitate modern school children and measures would be put in place to make the campuses climate resilient by incorporating water harvesting systems and renewable energy systems, she said. (SZB)
