Editorial | Opportunity to revisit Patterson report

No one is about to split hairs.  Nonetheless, it was peculiar, especially for the timing, that it was the Early Childhood Commission (ECC) and its chair, Trisha Williams-Singh, rather than the minister with responsibility for education and youth, Dana Morris Dixon, who announced a planned evaluation of the performance of Jamaica’s early childhood policies and programmes. 

This review, to be undertaken by a massive 26-member committee (whose members, hopefully, will avoid tripping over each other) comes mere weeks after the opposition shadow minister for education, Damion Crawford, filed a lawsuit, claiming that the government has breached its constitutional obligation to provide free pre-secondary education to the island’s children.

Yet, it is nearly five years since the publication of the Patterson Commission report on the reform of Jamaica’s education system, which has been subjected to, when it should have been at the centre of a robust, national mobilisation, consensus-building, priority-identifying debate as part of a fundamental assault for the rescue of the island’s crisis-riddled education sector.  Instead, the education ministry is engaged in a box-ticking implementation exercise for the report’s dozens of recommendations, including many on the early childhood sector. There is no clarity on the cost of this process, expected outcomes, expected timeframes for results, and how these will be measured.

Dr Morris Dixon was a member of the Patterson Commission before she joined the government.  However, the establishment of the implementation process preceded her assumption of the education portfolio 20 months ago.   Since then, though, she hasn't in any significant fashion, offered an assessment of the report; whether it continues to be relevant; or what from it, if anything, deserves greater priority in the face of the fast-evolving technologies and applications in artificial intelligence (AI).

REMEDY THIS FAILURE

Dr Morris Dixon should remedy this failure, as well as say whether the ECC initiative was inspired by Mr Crawford's court case, although the commission, by law, has independence to pursue such an action.

Under a 2011 amendment to Jamaica’s Constitution, which introduced a Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedom, every child who is a citizen of the island has the right “to publicly funded tuition in a publicly-funded educational institution at the pre-primary and primary levels”.

But in a system in which over 60 per cent of children in pre-primary education/stimulation mostly attend community-based ‘basic schools’. Most teachers in these institutions are not fully trained and lack the many of the materials required to stimulate children in the age group they teach, or care for.

That is part of the backdrop against which Mr Crawford accused the government of failing its obligation and over-hyping its support for these institutions.

While the government provides financial support for basic schools and helps to train their teachers, the vast majority of the over 2,000 that exist across Jamaica do not meet the benchmarks for full accreditation by Early Childhood Commission.

The ECC action elicits attention because of its coincidence with Mr Crawford’s court case, when before there was a seeming absence of urgency by the government in responding to the shortcomings and recommendations of the Patterson Report, authored by the renowned Jamaican-born, Harvard University sociology professor, Orlando Patterson. 

For instance, in its 2024 assessment of the readiness of four-year-olds for the school environment, the ECC found that 39 per cent, or approximately four in 10, required “further development analysis”, suggesting that their initial tests pointed to shortcomings in critical development milestones.  Another 7.6 per cent were flagged for classroom monitoring.

DECLINE

If the testing matrix remained consistent, the outcomes in 2024 represented a 12.9 percentage point decline on those from five years earlier, when “two-thirds of children (67.3 per cent) had no developmental concerns”.  

The weaknesses in this early stage of development carries through into primary school and beyond.  Of the children who complete their primary at Grade 6 (around ages 11 and 12) about a third don’t read at their age and grade levels, and over 40 per cent don’t meet the standards in maths.

At the secondary level, only a fifth of students (19 per cent) pass five subjects, inclusive of maths and English, in a single sitting of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams.  Between 15 and 20 per cent fail their English exams, while close to 60 per cent fail at maths, generally considered the minimum for matriculation to university education.

For the current fiscal year, Jamaica will spend J$8.5 billion, or four per cent of its education (recurrent) budget on pre-primary education, which a World Bank-UNICEF analysis of the island’s education expenditure concluded was under-funded.

The Patterson Commission recommended a rebalancing, steering money from the well-funded (via a three per cent payroll tax for the government’s training organisation, HEART) the technical, vocational education and training (TVET) to early childhood education. Unfortunately, there has been no significant public discussion on the issue.

The ECC’s proposed evaluation of early childhood policies provides Minister Morris Dixon not only an opportunity to put this question on the agenda, but for a reset of the Patterson report. It should be retabled in Parliament and sent to an appropriate committee for serious hearings.  Thereafter, Prime Minister Andrew Holness must become the foremost, and aggressive, champion of education transformation.