Opinion: Jamaica’s education reform moves forward, but systemic gaps remain

Last week, the Education Transformation Oversight Committee (ETOC) in Jamaica reported that just over one-third of the 365 recommendations from the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission (JTEC) report were implemented.

The JTEC Report is more commonly known as the Patterson Report, named for eminent Jamaican sociologist, Professor Orlando Patterson, who led the review as the Commission’s Chairman. The Report was completed in late 2021, with ETOC set up in 2023 to monitor the implementation of its recommendations until 2031. With 37% of the recommendations completed, the process is on track to hit its 40% milestone by the end of March, in keeping with its initial timeline.

If the current rate of execution is maintained for the remaining life of the Committee, this could augur well for the radical transformation of Jamaica’s education system, whose long-standing gaps have been well known and debated for the better part of the last half-century. Jamaica has had no shortage of bodies reviewing its education system. The Patterson Report was preceded by the Dr. Rae Davis-chaired Task Force on Education in 2004. While both reviews share several recommendations, the difference critically this time around lies in the ability to execute and to do so consistently. Jamaica has had success on this front recently in other endeavours with ETOC’s economic equivalent, the Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC), which has been hailed by financial multilaterals as a model worth emulating.

Despite the advances in implementation, however, the Patterson Report has yet to be debated in Jamaica’s Parliament by the country’s legislators. National public discourse on its content has also been limited.

Among the report’s key suggestions is redirecting a greater proportion of resources from tertiary to early childhood institutions, which remain relatively underfunded. This has been a chronic issue, and the reasoning is clear — the quality of intake of students at each successive level will only be as good as the output from the previous one. Starting at the base, therefore, makes sense.

This position has been advocated for a long time and has benefited from renewed attention with the push toward greater certification of early childhood institutions in recent years, though coverage remains far below full complement. The report also notes that Jamaica claims to have one of the highest rates of pre-primary enrollment in the world.

This suggests that Jamaicans intuitively understand the importance of education for their children, given frequent reminders that education is the path to upward social mobility and often the only avenue out of poverty.

However, the ability to sustain attendance weakens as students move through the system. Enrollment rates decline at each successive level, largely due to the cost of incidental expenses beyond tuition — including food, transportation, clothing, and school supplies.

Some families with multiple children must make difficult trade-offs, while others recognize that remaining in school may reduce opportunities to earn income for the household.

University enrollment declines

By the time students matriculate to university, enrollment drops sharply as many fall out of the system.

The situation has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic — a concern raised by Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, who has lamented that enrollment rates have yet to recover to pre-crisis levels.

The same trend may apply to other tertiary institutions, as the pandemic exposed severe inequalities in education. Many students simply did not return to school and remain unaccounted for. Similar challenges have emerged following the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa, with learning losses expected to widen further.

Technical education gains importance

The Patterson Report also recommended greater emphasis on technical and vocational education — an area which still experiences an unfortunate stigma compared with a traditional grammar school education. As trends in employment shift globally, skilled tradespeople have seen their stock rise to the point where demand for their labour is outpaced by the rate at which it can be supplied. Now that technical and vocational skills can command a higher premium, this will be important for Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean, which continues to struggle with a labour paradox highlighted by the most recent International Labour Organization (ILO) report for the region. It reiterated that despite declines in unemployment for most Caribbean countries, they still grapple with low-value-added jobs. More people are working, but the quality of employment is diminishing. As a result, thousands of people remain underemployed relative to their skills, qualifications, and time available for work.

Deep inequality at the secondary level

Beyond education’s intrinsic benefits — including shaping character, instilling values, and providing a foundation for nation-building — it also drives economic and social development.

The quality of social interactions is also determined by the quality of the education provided to the nation’s citizens. Challenges with accessing quality education remain, however. The Patterson Report quantified the depth and severity of the problem at the secondary level, which has been known anecdotally — of the 250 such schools, less than a fifth are deemed “traditional” or of sufficient quality to provide an acceptable level of education to function in the rest of society and beyond. The overwhelming majority are seen as undesirable. This leads to the annual bottleneck at the end of primary school examinations to get a coveted place at one of 40 prestigious schools, enrollment in which ultimately determines, to a significant extent, the student’s life trajectory, with the promise of better opportunities.

This dichotomy has been labelled as “apartheid” in nature in some quarters. Practically fixing the problem has not been given much prominence in education evaluations, however. Providing the most resources to the most deficient schools seems like the most obvious solution to equalise the disparity across the board. Some schools have shown progress, but most continue to languish near the bottom of educational rankings. Authorities in the past, by encouraging students to “grow where they are planted,” have unwittingly ignored that plants achieve the best results in gardens that are properly equipped with access to adequate sunlight, water, air, and minerals. Exceptional students should not be expected to raise the overall profile of an institution by their own performance in the absence of appropriate supporting structures to solve individually what has clearly been a systemic problem.

It is this fundamental issue that Jamaica’s education stakeholders must be committed to solving, lest we will have another assessment report by a different name at some point in the not-too-distant future.