EDUCATION is critical for social and structural development in society. It helps people to build communities, allows them to live healthy and productive lives, empowers women, and allows countries to enjoy sustained economic growth. Our education system has been modernised and developed to address the academic and social needs of students. It grooms them from nursery through the secondary level, and provides them with a solid foundation that they can use to build and develop the rest of their lives. This is the aim of the government. In 2009, the government implemented the new Education Strategic Plan at a cost of $20.3 billion. The new Education Strategic Plan priorities the need for quality education at all levels of schooling through school health and nutrition, teacher education, more inclusive education and through developing managerial capacity with the education sector. Last year, an additional $21.4 billion dollars was given to the education sector and this year’s budget allocation to the sector totalled $24.3 billion.
Under the new Education Strategic Plan, the construction, rehabilitation and maintenance of new schools were completed countrywide at a cost of more than $2.3 billion. The Cyril Potter College of Education was last year expanded, costing in excess of $375 million. This institution trained 491 teachers in 2009 and 364 teachers in 2010, and over 63,000 students benefited from the school feeding programme last year, when more than $900 million was spent to improve school health and nutrition of children.
And it seems that the more money spent on education, the greater the success rate and the overall educational development of students. Guyana can boast of consistent increases in CXC pass rates over the years as the overall CXC performance goes up yearly. While in 1992 the CXC pass rate for grades 1-4 was only 47.52%, that figure has consistently increased from that to 79.1% in 2005 to 83.3% in2009, and ultimately to 85.8% last year. It should be noted here, that the government bears the cost of every child’s education from nursery through secondary, providing a solid educational foundation free to all Guyanese. Government loans are subsequently made available to all Guyanese upon acceptance to the University of Guyana. But providing quality education to Guyanese is no luxury for the Guyanese people; it is the government’s obligation to educate the people. Nevertheless, it is in the people’s interests to effectively utilize this education.