BY LORETTA B MANELE
The Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development (MEHRD) is targeting 330 schools across the provinces under its new program.
Linda Wate, Deputy Secretary for Teaching Services for MEHRD spoke about this when the ministry launched its five-year System Transformation Education Program on Monday 21st, October.
This program consists of two GPE (Global Partnership for Education) approved grants which are a US$5 million system transformation grant and a US$1.5 million system capacity grant in which UNICEF will act as the grant agent and New Zealand’s MFAT (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade) will coordinate the efforts.
Wate said this new program will focus a lot around capacity strengthening for the Ministry of Education to lead and guide implementation of our policies with our partners in the provinces as well as with our schools.
“We are targeting about 330 schools as part of our PIP program and its extended support”
She said in these 330 schools, they anticipate to that the support will reach 2,650 teachers although there might be more depending on the number of teachers per school.
“Earlier next year we will do the baseline study to ensure that we know how many teachers exactly we are working with”
Wate said they are also looking to work with around 49,000 students across different provinces especially provinces like Malaita, West End and Makira and Central Province to reach out and continue their work from previous projects with schools in these provinces.
Moreover, she mentioned that they are also planning to increase the accessibility of their curriculum materials to schools and students.
Wate expressed that they have developed almost 28 new published materials.
“We now have the copyright to all these materials and we want to increase access to them to our stakeholders in the provinces especially teachers and students in the schools”
She said that there are plans to have these materials not only in textbooks but also through media, songs and videos.
Wate stressed that they are especially focusing on improving what teachers are doing and what students can do and learn especially in their classrooms.
“We are looking forward so much to ensuring that we use those opportunities to get the best outcomes that we are looking for in terms of supporting our students in some way”
