Gov’t to increase allocation to education
GOVERNMENT is to increase the amount of money allocated in the budget to education in the next financial year from its current $40 billion, Education Minister Andrew Holness said yesterday.
Minister Andrew Holness, while unable to say what the level of the increase would be, said it should be enough to focus on some critical areas such as early childhood education and complete transformation of the school system.
“Government will have to make a policy decision to spend more on education,” he said.
But the minister said the challenge was not just to increase allocation in the budget, but also to ensure that “we get maximum return in every dollar spent on education”.
Holness, who was addressing Observer editors and reporters at the newspaper’s head office on Beechwood Avenue in Kingston yesterday, said the other priority areas to receive attention from this increased allocation would include school expansion to create much needed additional space.
“As the space is created in schools then we will eliminate the shift system,” he explained, adding that eight schools have already been taken off the shift system this year.
Holness said violence in school was another major area which his government would be focussing, and that already there were several programmes in the ministry to tackle the problem.
According to the education minister, more per capita was being spent on university students than on any other levels.
“Would it be better then to have reallocation so we can spend more on the base such as early childhood level up to secondary?” he asked. This, he said, was pushing the government to look at the education budget, of which 70 per cent is now spent on administration and teaching costs.
Responding to the question of performance-based pay for teachers, Holness said several factors would have to be taken into consideration when determining how performance is judged.
He said factors to take into consideration would include whether the school environment is conducive to learning, if there are space problems and enough textbooks, as well as the safety of the school environment. All these, he said, would impact on the performance of students.
Holness said as such it was critical to focus on the major partners of education, which encompass the church, private sector, the media and to a major extent parents.
“We have to find a way to make the family and parenting a formal part of the education system,” he said.