RECOMMENDATIONS coming out of the recently-concluded ‘operational’ audit that was focused on nursery, primary and secondary schools in Guyana will be filtered into a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) that is currently being set up into the state of the country’s education system.This was disclosed by Education Minister Rupert Roopnaraine who spoke to the Guyana Chronicle on the sidelines of a book launch at the National Library yesterday morning.
The individuals to sit on the commission have already been identified. “I have gotten the names of all the people I have requested to sit on the commission. It’s going to be a very representative commission,” Roopnarine offered. He preferred not to reveal any names just yet.
The CoI is intended to last not more three months. “It can’t last very long because of the amount of work we have to do. I want a report from the inquiry as early as possible. There is urgent need for reform,” the minister said.
At the end of the CoI, he said he will make an assessment of the recommendations and seek to prioritise so that focus can be given to those areas with urgent need. “We have to get education right!” he said.
“From the evidence that I myself have become acquainted with as I travelled through the country, there is much dissatisfaction among parents and teachers. There is a lot of alienation in the education system and I wanted to get to the root of that,” he said, citing the need for the audit in the first place.
Commenting further on it, he said: “It is an operational audit so I need to find out what was happening in all of the schools in terms of environment, facilities, student/teacher ratios, management of the school, curriculum, because I believe these are all areas in which we needed to work to ensure that children have available to them facilities other than sitting in a classroom.”
“The audit has focused on all three levels of schools. This includes the schools in the hinterland because as you know one of the enduring problems we’ve had for a long time is the big gap between what we’re doing on the coast and what’s happening in the hinterland and the hinterland has really suffered from this kind of neglect. So we have more work to do in relation to the hinterland,” he said.
The audit took approximately two months to be completed. It is the first initiative worked on by Minister Roopnaraine.
Meanwhile, Government has allocated $33B to the education sector, 14.9 percent of the national budget; and has indicated its commitment towards enhancing budgetary transparency for the sector in the near future.

By Telesha Ramnarine