There has been a recorded 22.4 per cent increase in enrolment of three-year-olds and a 5.4 per cent increase in the enrolment of fouryear-olds at primary schools across Barbados over the last year, with the introduction of the Ministry of Education and Transformation’s Universal Pre-primary Education.
This was revealed by Chief Education Officer Ramona Archer-Bradshaw, who also noted that St Mary’s Primary School and the Lawrence T. Gay Memorial School welcomed three-yearolds for the first time this new school year, while Westbury Primary School “expanded to accommodate even more students in the early years.”
“While we are focused on building numeracy and literacy across all of our schools, we recognise that it is important to give our students the foundation that is required from early. Basic education in our Education Act starts from five and goes up until 16. But we said this year, we are going to expand it, so that very early on, from three years old, our children can be exposed to formal education.
“It means that they are going to learn the things that are required to be good citizens very early through what we call the play-based approach. So we want them figuring things out and solving problems at three years old.
Speaking on the topic, Education Transformation and The Power of Partnerships, Archer-Bradshaw said: “There is a need for us to understand that if we must indeed prepare our children for the future, we cannot continue with all of the practices of the past. If we do that, it means that we will be preparing our children to fail.
“Does this means that we are going to throw away everything that we had within our education system when we were growing up? No! It means that we are going to take the best elements of that education system. We are going to look to the future and see which elements we will have to develop and which elements we would have to create to ensure our children are ready for the future. We cannot continue to educate our children for the past and expect them to cope in the present or in the future.”
She stated that education has never really been free, since research by the Ministry of Education Transformation revealed “the amount of money spent on a secondary school student shows us that in Barbados every year, we spend approximately $16 000 per student per year.
Archer-Bradshaw made the disclosure as she delivered the inaugural V. Eudine Barriteau Lunchtime Lecture at The Ellerslie School last week to help mark the school’s 60th anniversary. (CH)