Braving the weather Friday morning, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand along with Regional Education Officer, Mr. Akbar Chinu and other education officials visited the homes of pupils who have continuously been absent from school and those who were absent at the recent National Grade Six Assessment mock examination.
The exercise, dubbed “Operation Recovery”, is part of the Ministry’s efforts to get students back into the classrooms and minimise learning loss. The exercise aims to assess the reasons behind the pupils’ absence so that a determination can be made about how the Ministry can assist these pupils with returning to school.
The exercise is being executed in all 11 education districts. Education Officers from Central Ministry and within the Education Districts along with Regional officials and community activists are currently fanned out into communities to locate these pupils.
Minister Manickchand noted that the world’s studies have shown that the long school closure will crash education systems around the world to the point where there will be a large number of dropouts and gaps and learning loss in the academic world.
“We are certain in Guyana that we do not want to be a statistic, that we can take measures to mitigate against those harsh consequences. One of the mitigating measures we are taking is insisting that no child at the Common Entrance or NGSA level will drop out of school and that is why we’re engaged in this activity.”
In addition to locating the Grade Six pupils, the exercise is also finding other children who have not been attending school because there is little to no access to resources for them to do so.
She appealed to all of Guyana to be a part of the efforts to ensure that each child has access to educational opportunities they rightfully deserve.
“There is no way we can change the lives of these children except to get them an education and we are very sure at the Ministry of Education that this is something that we can do. We can get these children back into schools and once we do, we are going to devise different things, different strategies and different ways of plugging the learning loss gap… we’re asking parents to send your children to school, we’re asking community members and everybody else to ensure as far as you can, we get every child back into the classroom.”
The Ministry believes firmly that urgent, practical, sustained measures such as teaching and learning from a consolidated curriculum, the provision of textbooks, re-training of teachers, using technology in the classroom and Operation Recovery will mitigate against the predicted loss to our students and country.
