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Poverty to Prosperity
Budget Presentation
Gordon House March 19, 2015
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Mr. Speaker, in our 4 years at the Ministry of Education, within the transformation
framework we started and/or completed the establishment of:
The Jamaica Teaching Council: to licence and regulate the teaching profession
The National Education Inspectorate: to evaluate education quality and set standards
The National Education Trust: to manage education infrastructure and mobilize
resources towards its development
The National College for Educational Leadership: to improve the quality of the
management and leadership of the schools
The National Parenting Commission: to create a formal state mechanism to engage,
inform, and mobilize parental support for education
The Competence-based Transition Policy: to end the automatic promotion of students
who did not master foundation literacy and numeracy skills
The nationalization of the Grade Four Literacy Test as a benchmark exam, and the
School Accountability Matrix for the management of literacy targets, which forced
schools and parents to intervene much earlier in the education life of the child,
providing information for schools to plan for the education needs of students and
gave students a better chance in the GSAT competition.
The ASTEP programme to support those children who did not attain mastery of
literacy skills after all their attempts. And create an alternative and more equitable
pathway to secondary education rather than the stratification inherent in GSAT.