For three days in May of last year Belize's best thinkers, talkers, educators, and policymakers gathered for the Education Summit. The event came after months of pre-planning, tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and promotion, and the single thought that the system is broke and we've got to fix it. Well the product of all those hours, all those well meant thoughts, and all that money was launched today, putting an end to one process and giving rise to another. We found out about the plan to manage the $100 million baby called education.
This is it: the National Education Plan, a hefty 250 page book? the final product coming out of the groundbreaking Education Summit that was held exactly one year ago. Well education policy makers hope to prove with this document that it wasn't all just talk. And in fact it wasn't, there is a plan and the plan is to spend less on planning and more on doing.
Jules Vasquez,
Its very costly to administer change so how do you all hope to do this?
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"Yeah I think you're absolutely right Jules. We can't be romantic about it. What we're saying is that we have to prioritize. We're committed to making those difficult choices and saying you can't have all this money for this particular area, for policy development and curriculum development and assessment, we know what the problems are and we don't have to spend all this money revising the curriculum all over again; let's use those funds on teacher training, let's use those funds on early childhood education. Let's use those funds on special education."
Those three areas plus adult education form the forefront of the work plan. A plan that will be guided and monitored by a secretariat headed by Diane Maheia who compiled the report.
Diane Maheia,
"We have set the course: the plan is ready for implementation. Now we must summon up the nerve and the endurance to hold the course, to make sure that these reforms are put in place and that our schools become better places for our learners, young and not so young, to play, to laugh, to learn, to be."
And while those children exist as cherubic idylls, they are also students that are failing exams at an alarming rate.
Jules Vasquez,
Education is, by all indications, at a crisis; if you look at the PSE results about half of our children are failing to learn what they should learn by standard 6. Are you all addressing this with the requisite sense of urgency which a crisis of that proportion requires?
Francis Fonseca,
"Well I would not say that education is in crisis, I say we face tremendous challenges. In terms of the PSE results, that really is outcome of a failure of the early childhood education level, that strong foundation which we believe our children need to get in those first four or five years of their education. That then allows them to perform better because it won't happen overnight because education obviously is a life long process and we won't be able to solve the challenges as quickly as we would like to, but we believe if we could target those key areas in the immediate future, they will have long lasting effects and long lasting returns for the entire country."
And that's the happy hope that future will be closer to perfect, even as the present is very tense.
Dianne Maheia, who compiled the report, will now head the secretariat to look after its monitoring and implementation.