News

St. Thomas candidate and Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Cynthia Forde, believes that the Barbados Labour Party’s EduTech programme has been responsible for a major transformation of education delivery in Barbados.

Speaking to a large crowd at Haynesville last Sunday night, Forde, an educator with more than 25 years experience, described the programme’s results as phenomenal. “In 1994 they put me to work with the best minister in the whole of Barbados, Mia Mottley,” she said. “And when we saw the shambles that education had been in at the hands of the Democratic Labour Party for ten years, we had to take stock and make some serious changes.

“Then Mia introduced EduTech. That is the phenomenal aspect of development in our school system that has change this country and turned it around.

“I am proud to tell you that my grand children at primary school can use the computer just as good as you who are adults in this audience who have been exposed to computers for years…

“Poor people’s children who could not get a computer in the house before, have now got access to the computer within the school.”

According to the veteran educator, Mottley, now Deputy Prime Minister, determined along with education planners, that the technology would only be effective if teachers were given the tools to be genuine change agents.

As a result, a major programme of teacher training was rolled out, but only after action was taken to rebuild much of the school plant across the island to make up for years of neglect under the DLP.

“Before we could put in the technology we had to put in the civil works because the Dems never made any effort to upgrade any school facilities…” Forde said. “We now can see schools that have been properly built out.

“Now children are in school enjoying the benefits of EduTech because of all the initiatives that came with it. Teacher training was a major aspect of EduTech because we knew you could not put technology in the schools and not train the teachers to make it an integral part of the effort to bring our children to the cutting edge.

There was also significant curriculum reform, where all the syllabi were upgraded to meet the needs of children in this country … today and in the future.”

The senior education official also spoke of the inclusion of children with disabilities in the mainstream of education, with appropriate facilities such as wheelchair ramps being installed to meet their needs. Special attention was paid to the Irvine Wilson School, she added, where a tremendous transformation had taken place to ensure that blind children were not left out of the advances in education delivery.

Additionally, the St. Thomas candidate said, as a teacher of 25 years experience mainly at the primary level she had always been concerned that the children of many poor Barbadians entered the system with no preparation at the nursery level. However, Government was able to introduce universal nursery education, with three new schools opened and two more to come on stream in the near future.

“Give us another opportunity to further upgrade this Barbados, further develop this Barbados …, to have all the initiatives we have pledged implemented, because we want Barbados to be better than ever,” Forde told her audience.