THERE is a saying that one cannot be educated and poor at the same time. That is another way of saying that the best way to empower someone is to provide him or her with a sound and rounded education. It is an established fact that education not only enriches a person’s understanding of himself and the world in which he or she lives, but that it also enhances productivity, creativity and other competencies such as entrepreneurship and technological innovation. As the experiences of several countries have demonstrated, it is not possible to achieve sustainable levels of development without substantial investment in human capital. It is precisely out of this recognition that the current administration has been investing heavily in the education sector. The sector was given the largest budgetary allocation in the 2021 Budget Estimates. With an allocation of $60.7 billion in the 2021 national budget, the sector received a 16.7 per cent increase over the 2020 allocation. This sum represented the largest and demonstrated the high priority which the administration places on the sector.

These allocations are in sharp contrast to what obtained under the past PNC administration when the sector was grossly underfunded to the extent that we were at one time the worst performing country in the Region. Thankfully, that performance deficit has now been largely closed and our students are becoming as competitive as any of their regional counterparts.
The challenge facing the delivery of education in this COVID-sensitive environment can be daunting, but it does create some new and innovative delivery modalities which have, to a fair degree, mitigated the loss of classroom teaching. Both students and parents are becoming much more technologically ‘savvy’ as the government seeks to find alternative teaching/learning strategies to compensate for the loss of direct classroom teaching. There may be some merit in the argument that some schools and families are better endowed in terms of the necessary technological infrastructure which, in some ways, could place some students at a disadvantage in terms of access and delivery of education modules.

Cognisant of this reality, the administration is now in the process of equipping all schools, from nursery to secondary levels, with the necessary resources to bridge what some may refer to as the ‘digital divide.’ At the higher end of the education pyramid, the government is vigorously pursuing its online training programme which will allow 20,000 students to benefit from scholarships over the next five years in keeping with a campaign promise by President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali. These are no mean achievements in terms of the democratisation of education delivery, which allows for greater accessibility to a much wider cohort of the nation’s children all across the geographic spectrum of the country.
Few can deny that our children are doing much better today in terms of education-attainment levels. The recent CXC results, both at the Caribbean Secondary Examinations Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) have once again placed the country in the regional spotlight. Two Guyanese students, Bhedesh Persaud and Zane Ramotar, have topped not only the country but the Region at the CSEC and CAPE examinations, respectively. Queens College, which both students attended, was named by the CXC Council as the best-performing school for this year in the Region.

The success rate in terms of student-attainment levels is not confined only to the top performers or to the top secondary schools. The records will show that there is today a much better spread of examination passes throughout the country and not, as in past years, only to a selected few schools in the city. This is due in large measure to the several policy interventions initiated by the PPP/C administration at the various levels. At the primary level, there was the Primary Education Improvement Project which saw several critical interventions in terms of teacher training; curricula reform; infrastructural overhaul; capacity building and institutional strengthening. At the secondary level, there was the Secondary School Reform Project which provided for improved quality of secondary education to a much larger number of students at the secondary level. Several Community High Schools and primary school tops were converted to discrete secondary schools, thereby allowing for a much greater cohort of students to sit the CXC examinations than was otherwise possible.
As the country prepares for a more robust and accelerated development trajectory, the role of education is becoming increasingly critical. Indeed, the nexus between education and national development has never been more timely and relevant.