Yesterday we told you that the Public Expenditure Review stated that the government wasn't making back what it is investing in education. And today the PM said that in their discussions with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, it was pointed out to them that they needed to begin investing in training the teachers.
Today he explained that it's not taking a dig at the quality of teachers Belize has, but rather pointing out the need to increase the level of their work.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"That's why we sat down with MCC when they came to us and said, we need to analyze what are your needs, and we said we don't need to analyze, we know what are our needs. One of them was education because we've been seeing that year after year, successive governments are pumping more and more money, investing more and more money in education but what we're getting in return is not justified so we have to see what's going wrong and one of the issues that the MCC have been pointing out is that we need to do more teacher training, that we need to work more with our teachers to ensure that we can give the proper training to our students and I don't want the teachers to think that I'm saying this negatively, but it's something positive when we want to offer you more training to be on top of your game, to ensure that the students can learn, to look at what we're doing in education, how we can change education to ensure that the students that graduate in the future are students that can find a job in the economy, the economy is changing. Yes, agriculture is growing, tourism, but so is the services, so we have to stay on top and so we agree with the IMF and that's why we are working along with the teacher' union, along with the public servants or public officers and the ministry to ensure that we could make the necessary adjustments."
Next week we'll have a closer look at the revealing findings of the Public Expenditure Review.
