Education reform no easy task

 THE Government’s move to replace the much-maligned outcomes-based education (OBE) system with the tried and tested standards-based approach has hit a snag. 

Education Minister Nick Kuman was quoted this week saying the transition would take longer than anticipated and would most likely not be implemented next year as was originally planned.

We have seen this happen before, where a government promises to usher in change but no matter how well-intentioned it is, the time lag between the plan and it being completed is always significant.

Here it is no different.

Kuman forecasted that the Education Department would simply not have enough time to shift the country’s education curriculum, which has been attuned to the OBE system for a over a decade.

The government had already made its intentions clear with the then Education Minister, Paru Aihi, announcing an exit plan for the OBE system in 2012. 

According to former acting education secretary, the late Dr Joseph Pagelio, the decision was made based on reports that the country lacked the scientific and technical workforce required to implement the system.

The government had an inquiry into the OBE curriculum, which cost taxpayers K1 million and was completed last year.

Kuman said the Education Department would not have enough time to complete the transition back to the old system because the retraining of teachers from elementary to secondary would take time.

He said the teachers had to accept the change and teach students the old curriculum.

Kuman said his officers were starting to conduct training for elementary to grade three, but there was limited time left until the end of the year. 

He said training for teachers in upper primary and other levels would continue next year to help them adapt to the change.

One wonders what the state was doing between the 2012 announcement and the present to be in this situation? 

As it stands, the OBE has been demonised,  with critics claiming it required time and resources that very few schools had available. It was adopted by the Education Department in 2000 as part of a periodic reform (the third stage). 

Teachers to be mere enablers, while students took the front seat in the learning process. This was is in contrast to what the country had undergone in pre-independence times and the 25 years preceding 1975, with students learning from a regimented syllabus and assessed mostly through tests and examinations.  

In hindsight, the department shot itself in the foot with the hurried implementation of the new system. The Curriculum Reform Implementation Project (CRIP) developed the OBE curriculum but the lack of awareness and in-service training for teachers was the real obstacles in delivering the OBE.

One glaring fact was that the system, which had been tried in several developed countries, was subsequently discarded after a short span of time. But this never factored into the Education Department’s plans to reform the system.

An anecdote related to the system had Australian Prime Minister John Howard describing the system as “gobbledygook”. 

Even senior educationists in the country could not make heads or tails of the OBE.

The system does have some support, with commentator Dr Michael Unage saying in 2012, when explaining the intricacies of OBE, that the government needed to rethink the idea of an exit strategy, and instead focus at tweaking the type of OBE system being used. 

Unage postulated that the OBE was perhaps not entirely to blame for the drop in education standards, but that another contributing factor was the shift to using local vernacular at the elementary and primary school levels introduced at around the same time as the OBE. 

What must be asked is will education standards improve when the shift back to the familiar system is complete?

The government may proclaim its free education policy and the return to the old standards based system but can we be sure learning and results will be better?