Appoint teachers to the Education Transformation Commission - Cowell

WESTERN BUREAU:

Dr Noel Cowell, a senior lecturer at The University of the West Indies’ (UWI) Mona School of Business and Management, has taken Prime Minister Andrew Holness to task for failing to include teachers on his Education Transformation Commission, which was established one year ago to review and assess Jamaica’s education system.

Addressing Monday’s opening session of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association’s (JTA) 57th annual conference at the Ocean Coral Spring Resort in Trelawny, Cowell said the situation has not changed, despite former Education Minister Karl Samuda making a pledge to address it.

“The prime minister [Holness] said he wanted the commission to advise the Government on how to create a world-class educational system, and he wanted to be advised on how to ensure access to education was equitable across the board,” said Cowell. “Those are very good objectives, but then there was this inexplicable error when he failed to name to the commission the people who have to implement it and who are on the ground having the experiences day in, day out.”

“When you do not include the teaching profession and its union in something as important as that, it strikes me as being a problem. I know you had complained, and Mr Samuda came to your conference and said he would make the representation at the appropriate level, but it appears to me that things have not changed,” added Cowell.

Shortly after its formation last July, the Professor Orlando Patterson-chaired commission was criticised by the JTA’s then president, Owen Speid, for not having local teachers or youth as part of its body.

Additionally, a report published by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in March this year stated that the organisation had used its Reimagine Education initiative to make up for Jamaica’s lack of a youth representative on the commission.

In the meantime, Cowell advised teachers that they should not wait to be included in such commissions, or other similar groups, to act on their mandate of developing educational opportunities for students.

“You do not have to be invited or to be near the table, to be able to establish an agenda or advance on the existing agenda that you must have for the digital transformation of our educational system, and for bridging or addressing the economic and social divide that exist in education. Ensure that you frame yourself, that you set the agenda … that those things are what you are trying to address,” Cowell continued.

The JTA’s conference this year is being held under the theme ‘Bridging the digital and social divide: Transforming education for economic development and sustainable development’.