Authorities are preparing to overhaul school curricula and textbooks as part of its ambitious education reform drive, intended to improve teaching, support families and boost literacy and numeracy among students, Chief Education Officer
Dr Ramona Archer-Bradshaw said Thursday.
She made the announcement as a teachers’ workshop on improving mathematics teaching opened at the Seventh-day Adventist Conference Centre.
The review aims to ensure students are supported not just in school but also at home, she said.
As part of the education transformation agenda, the ministry has already started rationalising the textbooks used across primary and secondary schools. “You will hear, in very short order, what books will be in use,” Dr Bradshaw said, adding that a parent education programme will also be introduced.
The programme is being designed to take a holistic approach, equipping parents with the resources to help their children navigate schoolwork: “It will include the creation of videos on the end of the Ministry of Education, you know, teaching certain concepts in mathematics that may seem to be difficult. I often hear parents talk about the old math and the new math, and they don’t know the new math. These are some things that I have been in conversation with the Curriculum section about, and we will be looking to see how we can make it easier for parents to follow.”
Dr Bradshaw said videos will provide step-by-step guides for teaching concepts such as fractions. “So the information may not be in the textbook, but they can go online, Ministry of Educational Transformation website, click, ‘how do I teach fractions?’ and click, and they will have a step-by-step way of doing that,” she said.
She also highlighted the link between literacy and numeracy, stressing that strong reading skills are essential for effective problem-solving in mathematics. “We have literacy persons, we have people out in the field working with reading and because numeracy is all part and parcel of that, if you can’t read and comprehend, you can’t do problem solving,” Dr Bradshaw said. “Once you are able to read, it’s going to become easier for you to be able to read the book. So that programme has lifted off. It’s in the field. So now we have a little leeway here from mathematics, and hopefully children will be more receptive because, of course, those literacy skills would have been improving over time.”
Effective teaching of reading in classrooms reduces the need for parents to send their children to extra reading classes, she said, as she outlined a number of literacy education packages the education ministry is deploying.
She said: “Over the past year and a half, the ministry has been implementing an intensive programme in literacy, where we have trained over 311 teachers in the use of the Lindamood-Bell Seeing Stars programme, as well as Snappy Sounds. From this September, we have also introduced a reading period per day where teachers and children will engage in the teaching and learning of reading.”
Dr Bradshaw noted that the ministry is collaborating with the National Library Service and other agencies to make reading a national movement. She said the education minister’s recent statement outlined that by 2026, all students by the age of seven should be able to read, and she added that the ministry is well on track to achieve this goal. (LG)
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