Probably the most quizzical piece of reportage on last Friday’s event to mark the first public consultation for the Commission of Inquiry into the education system in Guyana had to do with the disclosure regarding the paucity of attendance at the event.
One assumes that attendance would have been deemed compulsory for greater numbers than those who reportedly showed up, including Ministry officials in Georgetown, Education officers and at least a number of senior teachers. In fact one wonders whether it would not have been a better idea to use the Arthur Chung Convention Centre in the first place, even though, as it turned out, that might have been an even more acute embarrassment.
This newspaper has no clear idea as to the reason (s) for the poor attendance though one wonders whether the Ministry, in its pre-event publicity, might not have done as much as it could have done, given what can be described as the historic significance of the hearings.
Mind you, the turnout on Friday may, after all, have nothing to do with the level of interest in the proceedings and one has to assume that representatives of the various stakeholder groups would get an opportunity to share their views with the Commission of Inquiry. In fact, it would be an entirely worthwhile strategy for the Education Ministry to provide periodic public reminders that those persons who are interested and who have contributions to make within the ambit of the terms of reference are invited to do so.
One decided oddity of the COI is the naming of a Commission that comprises ten members, surely an excessive number and one which, we can only conjecture, has to do with that eternal search for what we loosely describe as ‘balance’ whenever selection of a group that attracts a measure of national attention takes place. What, arguably, might also be deemed as more than a trifle conspicuous is the absence of either the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary or its Chief Education Officer from the list of Commissioners, even though the Ministry’s PS had already said a bit about the education system during her testimony at the Public Service Commission of Inquiry.
In its earlier pronouncements on the work of the COI the Ministry of Education had said that its overall objective was to establish “a baseline analysis of the state of public education in Guyana and recommend broad strategic guidelines for the enhancement of public education.” The statement also quoted Education Minister Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine as asserting that “education in Guyana will require comprehensive and far-reaching reform if the system is going to prove capable of addressing the country’s developmental needs. This reform will necessarily only be achievable subsequent to a far-ranging inquiry into the public education sector, one that paints as accurate a picture as possible of the state of the sector at present.”
What the Ministry’s statement and the Minister’s assertion do, of course, is to underscore the magnitude of the challenge and perhaps raise some questions as to whether one can secure an “accurate” picture “of the state of education” in Guyana based on a probe that confines itself to four years (2010-2014). Additionally, since the Ministry’s media release states that the recommendations (of the COI) “will be fed into the administrative policy and legislative process” to enable the pursuit of the recommendations, the question, arguably, also arises about the future of the Education Bill tabled in the National Assembly by the then Education Minister Priya Manickchand in June 2014 and which seeks to address many of the issues that now fall under the deliberative jurisdiction of the Commission of Inquiry.
Some of the issues that will arise at the hearings of the COI will be fairly predictable; teachers’ salaries, conditions of services, the physical state of schools, security for schools in a violent environment, reforms at the Cyril Potter College of Education, parent involvement in the education process, discipline in schools…all of these are going to arise and will in many, if not all instances, generate vigorous discourse during the exchanges between the witnesses and the commissioners.
While one anticipates that the deliberations of the COI will be taken up, substantially, with the conditions of service of teachers, this newspaper believes that it would be an error not to place a considerable measure of weight on the role of parents as a stakeholder in the education process. It is a matter on which this newspaper has commented in our editorial columns from time to time. Current and critical challenges in the education system point unerringly to the need for a much greater measure of parental influence as stakeholders in education. Indeed, we believe that a case can be made for the argument that some of the more challenging problems facing the education system (particularly those pertaining to the vexed issue of discipline in schools) can be tackled far more coherently and to greater effect if more formal mechanisms for parental involvement are instituted.
If the process is to be confined to the period for which it is intended to last it is important that it be managed efficiently. Chairmanship of such a weighty COI demands, at the start, a conceptual appreciation of the anticipated outcomes. In the case of the Public Service Commission of Inquiry an argument can be made for suggesting that the proceedings were reflective of an excessive tolerance of some witnesses. What was clear in some instances was that some witnesses appeared before the Commission with an excessively broad interpretation of its mandate, holding forth on issues that were nowhere to be found in the Terms of Reference. This current Inquiry must avoid such generous gestures lest, administratively, it loses its way altogether.
In that context a clear prior conceptual appreciation of the anticipated outcomes of the COI would enable a coherent continuous assessment of the evidence as it is tendered so that by time that aspect of the process comes to an end there would have already been established an understanding of both the form and content of the reporting component of the exercise.
It is apposite to mention that some measure of duplication of evidence may well occur at the level of the education COI since many education-related issues were ventilated – some in considerable detail – during the Public Service Commission of Inquiry. Several of those submissions will doubtless prove instructive in the proceedings of the education COI – the one that comes readily to mind is the joint submission by Mark Lyte and Coretta McDonald, the President and General Secretary, respectively, of the Guyana Teachers Union. Their submission to the Public Service COI covered ground that will, in all likelihood, be gone over during the current education COI and it would do the commissioners a world of good to secure access to their submission since it should appreciably aid their current labours.
What perhaps remains to be said is that we believe that the commencement of the most recent COI will raise hopes of wide-ranging reform in the education system in much the same way as hopes would appear to have been raised in the Public Service so that the more thoroughly this Commission does its work and the more that the outcomes reflect strong recommendations for reform akin to the sentiments expressed by the Minister of Education, the better off our education system is likely to be.
