The government is committed to providing quality secondary education for all children. This has been the aim for a long time, but it is something which has not proved so easy to deliver for any number of reasons. One of these is simply geography. Given sufficient influx of funds (which in practice we have never had) it has always been theoretically achievable in the urbanised areas, but then there are all those scattered villages, not only along the coast and coastal hinterland, but more especially in the interior where village numbers are small, and distances between them large. Even as things stand, Indigenous parents are often challenged to equip their children for school attendance at the primary level, and the youngsters may have to travel a considerable distance, sometimes by canoe.
Where the interior is concerned, under the PNC there was the system of Hinterland scholarships, whereby pupils from Indigenous regions who performed well at what was then called Common Entrance, were placed at city secondary schools, including Queen’s College, and boarded in Georgetown at state expense. Some also attended schools in Essequibo. The numbers who benefited from this programme were inevitably very limited, although it might be noted in passing that the late Minister Desrey Fox was one of those who first came to the city under this scheme.
After President’s College was opened, the practice was to place Indigenous scholarship winners who had won places in senior secondary schools there, because it was a boarding establishment. Gradually over the period before 1992 a very small number of secondary schools made their appearance in interior locations.
The PNC was particularly interested in expanding secondary education in relation to the wider population, and in the 1960s they moved to expand educational opportunity in this regard for example by opening Charlestown Government Secondary in 1965 and North Georgetown in 1969. There were also the multilateral school experiments in the 1970s which were tried in the city and along the coast and were based on the comprehensive school model. Infinitely less successful even in their heyday were the community high schools, which made no progress even though they had much to recommend them in their original conception. Yet the old primary school tops continued to co-exist with all the new secondary institutions, and are still with us.
While Burnham, who had been an education minister under the original PPP government, may had had the intention of providing access to secondary education for all citizens, his own actions killed his dream. After the Declaration of Sophia the society took a leftward lurch which as far as education was concerned, it simply did not have the funding to sustain. First there was the nationalisation of the private (dual control) schools, which it could not afford and lacked the large-scale bureaucracy to run, and then there was the matter of the books.
Georgetown had always had a varied and well-stocked complement of bookshops for such a small, albeit very literate population, but those stores depended for their profits on the sale of textbooks. Initially determined to control the mark-up on textbooks, when the government moved in this direction it sounded the death-knell of the bookstores. However, they completely disappeared from our streets when it was decided that schools should be provided with free textbooks. Not only could the administration simply not afford a measure which in other circumstances might be regarded as laudable, but again it did not have the facilities for storage or the bureaucracy for distribution in place. As a consequence books were lost and unaccounted for, and children often went without texts.
As for the bookshops, the city was left with one: the government-run Guyana National Trading Corporation in Camp Street, which decided on the reading matter which should be imported, for all of that some of it not unworthy of an unregulated private store. However as was the case with other departments, it suffered from lack of foreign exchange and therefore variety.
The most serious blow to the education system came in relation to teachers. In the first place, beginning in the mid-1970s, the government could not pay them a respectable wage, and in the second, Burnham refused to respect their professionalism, requiring them to take children out on the street for political purposes and to greet visiting dignitaries. At a later stage there were the infamous Mass Games imported from North Korea, which infuriated parents and not just teachers. The result of all this was that teachers decamped in droves, often to the islands where they were hired immediately at a living wage, if not better. It used to be said that at one time a certain training college in one of them was run exclusively by Guyanese.
The problem of paying teachers has remained with us throughout the years, and is responsible for the country’s inability to retain them in the system. Even when they are given on-the-job training, they often use this as a stepping-stone for migration. No education system can make progress without competent teachers.
As mentioned earlier, the various PPP/C governments have also been very committed to the expansion of secondary education, and have not been without their successes. Under the pressure of a pandemic, they have particularly explored online learning. The original plan was to have sufficient secondary institutions of an equal standard so that the SSEE could be dispensed with, and children would be sent to the secondary school in their local area. While this may still be the dream, it has had to be abandoned for the time being, because not only are there insufficient secondary schools in the country, those that do exist are not on par. As such, the assessment taken at the end of primary school has to effectively function as a form of placement exam.
The biggest challenge will be the Primary Tops which only teach up to Grade Nine. We reported Minister Priya Manickchand as saying recently that the Ministry of Education had it in mind to help further the education provided for Grade Nine pupils who attended Primary Tops, but she did not elaborate. Ideally, one imagines, the plan would be to get rid of them altogether, but clearly by implication we are nowhere near that point yet.
But where a greater equality of standards is concerned in those secondary schools which do exist, the Minister announced that there were plans for seven more of them to offer CAPE subjects. This means that they would have a sixth form, just like the top schools in the country. She is right in believing that a sixth form accords a certain completeness to a secondary school and gives it a greater academic profile. Her problem will be the inheritance of a seriously depleted teaching profession, an issue which no government has successfully addressed since Burnham’s day. It does not help her that she is at such odds with the teachers’ union.
Teachers at the CAPE level will usually be expected to be academically qualified in their fields, and these are in serious short supply, even for the purposes of the current sixth forms. It may be that with the inauguration of the National Open Learning Institute the gaps in terms of qualified personnel can be filled, although it may not be in the fields which are required. But there is another problem.
It has always been assumed – although there are no known figures where this is concerned – that a significant number of those sitting CAPE and ‘A’ Levels before that, were seeking a tertiary education outside Guyana, since UG requires only CSECs. People trained abroad may also decide to stay abroad, although perhaps the assumption is that some of those entering a sixth form in the JC Chandisingh, West Demerara or Anna Regina secondary schools would not have the means to go outside, or alternatively they would be persuaded by the online opportunities on offer to continue their education here.
Ms Manickchand did not indicate which subjects are being contemplated, but if it includes the science subjects which the government is so interested in, then that would require a considerable capital investment in labs, etc, in particular.
While the plans may appear to have promise, parents and teachers wait to see what the details will be.
