Education Dept urged to address learning crisis

 THE Education Department has been urged to initiate policy reforms to address the “crisis in student learning” in schools. 

Acting Education Secretary Dr Michael Tapo told a senior education officers conference in Alotau yesterday that there was a consensus among education specialists and stakeholders that “children are not learning in our schools and therefore they are unable to reach the required national learning standards”.

Tapo said children were failing and this would seriously undermine the achievement of the national goals and targets in the Vision 2050.

He said the way forward was to progress some of the important priorities such as the outcome-based education exit strategy, compulsory education, teacher training and elementary education by coming up with better strategies.

He said existing education policies such as automatic promotion of students from one grade to the next and the absence of national student learning achievement testing at elementary and lower primary was compounding the problem.

This led to children completing the primary circle without being able to read and write, he said.

As a result the new emphasis was that English be reintroduced as the language of instruction starting at elementary level.