MEMBER States of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have been urged to pay closer attention to the formative years of children and work harder to increase access to quality Early Childhood Education.

This was one of the recommendations, which came out of the Twentieth Meeting of the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) on Education, which ended in Georgetown last Wednesday.

According to a statement from the CARICOM Secretariat, the COHSOD underscored the importance of achieving Universal Early Childhood Education by 2015.

They agreed that ECE was pivotal in laying the foundation for primary education and in helping the Region to meet the Millennium Development Goals 2 which targets universal primary education by 2015.

Against this backdrop, the COHSOD agreed that by 2015 access to quality Early Childhood Education should be at a minimum of 30% for the birth to two years age group and 100% for the 3-5 years age group.

Commending the progress being made in providing quality early childhood education in several Member States, the COHSOD  called for further improvements in the areas of harmonised policies, regulations and standards to address the imperative of quality early childhood care and development.

On this premise, therefore, the Meeting welcomed the development of a Framework for Action for Children as a tracking instrument on the progress of the Region towards ‘Education For All’; and agreed on the urgency of completing such a framework in order to facilitate, among other things, a Caribbean Child Status Report by 2015.

The COHSOD also encouraged Member States to utilize the Framework, when completed, in ensuring timely and harmonized regional reports on the agreed goals and targets underlined in that document.

The COHSOD also agreed to give consideration to the proposal from UNICEF to include a Social Budgeting component in the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for Action for Children and requested UNICEF to provide updates on that issue.

CARICOM said several other decisions were taken to improve the regional and national education system. Among those were the establishment of teaching regional and national councils; the streamlining of the tertiary sector; strengthening of regional accreditation systems; and the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at all levels of the system.
The latter decision led to a mandate for the CARICOM Secretariat to begin and work on a policy to define the use of ICTs in Education. The Secretariat should submit a preliminary report to COHSOD by October 2011.