Has the Quality of Education Improved Since Plan Belize?  

The People’s United Party, in its Plan Belize manifesto, presented a policy paper that would advance the Education Agenda in Belize. One of the initiatives was to implement a new curriculum, a module that the Ministry of Education introduced at the start of the 2023-2024 school year. Under its structure, students are assessed based on how well they grasp the contents. In this week’s edition of the Five Point Breakdown, we explore how the education system at the high school level has performed since 2020. The Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca, said while there have been quite a few achievements realized, there’s a lot more to complete. We got the perspectives of two high school principals who manage high schools that are on the north and south sides of Belize City on how the revamping of the curriculum has resulted in the students’ performance. Interestingly, while students at both schools have commonalities in weak areas, the COVID-19 pandemic is the reason for those weaknesses at one of the institutions, while attendance issues among its student population, mainly due to social challenges, was the reason for its students’ academic challenges. News Five’s Marion Ali reports.

 

Marion Ali, Reporting

It’s a typical school day at Sadie Vernon High School, but only a fraction of the two hundred and two enrolled students is present. Students here receive free tuition, uniforms, daily meals, transportation, and learning devices. Despite this support, many students at the four Belize City schools in the Southside Upliftment Project still struggle with attendance.

 

Social Issues & School Attendance

 

Deborah Martin, Principal, Sadie Vernon High School

“Being absent, just because they want to be absent and you can see them on the street when you walk down the lane and so on. It tells a picture to you that, you know, I’m in school but I’m not necessarily in school. Sometimes parents may say, I need my child to come and help me pick up the younger brother or younger sister. You know, I need to send my child to pick up money from social and, you know, these are things that cause them to be out of school.”

Sadie Vernon, Gwen Liz, Maud Williams, and Excelsior High School were chosen by the Ministry of Education for the project. This initiative is part of a broader effort to enhance education quality in Belize, launched after the PUP came to power in 2020.

 

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education

“The Education Upliftment Project has been very successful, really transforming lives across the country. We now have over twenty-one high schools across the country that are a part of that free education program. So, with that we’re about fifty percent of where we want to be.”

 

Marion Ali

“While the Ministry of Education has made efforts to improve the quality of education in Belize, one factor has hampered its effect. As Principal of E.P. Yorke High School, Karen Canto shares, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the performance of its students, particularly in math. As a result, the school has had to offer additional classes for them to catch up.”

 

COVID & Education

 

Karen Canto, Principal, E.P. Yorke High School

“One of our challenges is deficiencies that COVID unfortunately brought on us because we have a lot of deficiencies in the basic skills that the kids need, as in English and math. We don’t even have to go beyond that. The basics as in multiplication, division, the basic skills, computation, a lot of them have lacking. They struggle to write; their penmanship is poor and reading cursive, for example – a teacher writes in cursive on the whiteboard, they can’t read it. Their handwriting, although they’re in first, second form, they’re writing like they’re in standard one. And we still have to have them ready for sixth form, right, so lately we have been trying to fill in the blanks. First and second forms do remedial in the evenings. Past students, E.P. Yorkers that are at U.B. or John’s, they come in four days of the week.”

 

We discovered that students struggle with similar subjects. According to Deborah Martin, the Principal of Sadie Vernon, math and literacy are particularly challenging for the students.

 

Problems with Math and English

 

Deborah Martin

“We have students with reading issues or they lack the foundational skills in reading and numeracy and even in the social aspect of it. And so, to fit that curriculum or localize it to our school, we can only take some of the things that they give us to put it into action here. And because we have to meet our students where they came and to help them incrementally improve, they may not be meeting the standards for certain levels at our high school.”

 

Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca stated that the goal of many Plan Belize initiatives is to raise education standards.

 

Francis Fonseca

“We unveiled for the nation our new competency-based curriculum. I’m very proud of that curriculum. Obviously, it’s still a work in progress in terms of getting adopted across our education system. Curriculum reform was another major commitment that we made, that we’re very proud of the fact that we were able to put in place this very progressive, very comprehensive, competency-based approach to learning and teaching. Another commitment we made was free education, and again there we’ve achieved what we started. We set up and established for the first time a science and technology unit as a part of the Ministry of Education acknowledgement and recognition of the importance of science and technology to education. We established the 501 Academy portal. We established the Teacher Learning Institute as a digital portal again for training our teachers.”

 

Fonseca also emphasized the ConnectEd Project, which offers free internet access to schools across Belize and an unprecedented number of scholarships for students to attend their chosen schools. We asked the two principals for their views on whether the quality of education has improved since these programs were introduced in recent years.

 

Has Education Quality Improved?

 

Deborah Martin

“We have incrementally improved, but we’re not where we’re supposed to be.”

Karen Canto

“ I came straight out of sixth form, no pedagogy, nothing. Today, almost everybody you interview is already a licensed teacher, and they already finished their diploma education, or their bachelors in education, so they are more qualified to deliver for sure.”

 

The minister highlighted areas needing urgent attention under Plan Belize 2.0, such as special education and vocational training.

 

Urgent Priority Areas

 

Francis Fonseca

“Stella Maris, we have planned, we’ve been working for two years on a plan to really rehabilitate, refurbish the Stella Maris School. One key area that I want to focus on moving forward is really more investment in TVET, more investment in technical, vocational education and training. If we are equipping our people, our young people in particular, with the skills and tools they need to find jobs.”

 

Fonseca announced that a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar grant from the Millennium Challenge Corporation will be used to reform the vocational education system and improve the legal framework for education. Marion Ali for News Five.