Cabinet to Receive Report of Education Task Force

A comprehensive report prepared by the Education Task Force is expected to be approved by Cabinet next Monday (December 13), after which it will be tabled in Parliament.
Information Minister, Senator Burchell Whiteman made this disclosure at the weekly post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House yesterday (December 6). The Minister explained that the report “seeks to do what the terms of reference required of the Task Force, which is to provide a plan and an approach for transforming the education system”.
Commissioned by Prime Minister P.J. Patterson in February of this year, the Education Task Force was established primarily, to identify the means of improving the country’s education sector.
Dr. Rae Davis, Chairman of the National Council on Education and President of the University of Technology (UTech), headed the Task Force. Minister Whiteman said the report also sought to examine how, through the education system, “we may become and remain a people with a competitive workforce and a people who are living in the kind of environment that we all seek to have a quality of life befitting a people with our traditions”.
The Task Force’s report is comprised of four specific elements – the issue of governance and management; the curriculum teaching and support; stakeholder participation in the education system; and the issue of financing.
Senator Whiteman pointed out that discussions concerning the Task Force’s recommendations “took a very long time, because everybody had a contribution to make and a view”.
The Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture also hosted a number of Education Roundtables across the island during the course of the year, to allow not only persons working within the school system, but also the public at large, to present their views and suggestions for change.
“There was very high commendation of the Task Force’s membership for the quality of work that had been done. So at least you can be sure that at the level of government, there is satisfaction with the work done by the Task Force,” the Minister said.