Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand announced yesterday that schools will be fully reopened on April 25.
On the sidelines of the newly launched artificial intelligence leadership programme, ‘Spark’, the education minister told the Department of Public Information (DPI) that all systems are being put in place to reopen schools to address the two years of learning loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Some skills that were acquired will be lost and forgotten and you might even have the phenomena of dropouts presenting itself in larger numbers than we have ever seen before and we are seeing indications of all of those things so are we ready… We are making sure of course that schools are ready to be reopened fully from April 25th after the Easter holiday”, she said
To ensure teachers and students are prepared for the new term, DPI said that the ministry has implemented a staggered system which will see students revisiting studies from their previous grade within a 20- week period before moving on to the new term’s curriculum.
Manickchand also announced a new programme that will be rolled out to target literacy loss in the four core subjects.
“You’re going to see an assault on illiteracy, you will see an entire national programme rolled out to recover from the literacy loss we would have had and all the gains we would have made that went down the drain in two years. Every single student is going to be diagnosed, we are issuing a diagnostic for Mathematics, English, Social Studies and Science – the four cores. Every student will be diagnosed and each student will be attended to individually to make sure that we recover from the Covid loss”, she said.
The education ministry announced the closure of schools back in March 2020, following the outbreak of the pandemic.
