Crawford questions whether Gov’t in breach of child education rights
Published:Saturday | November 11, 2023 | 12:09 AM
OPPOSITION SENATOR Damion Crawford has signalled that he will be asking the court to make a declaration on whether the Government was in breach of Section 13(k) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms.
Section 13 (k) of the Charter declares it a right of every child, “who is a citizen of Jamaica, to publicly funded tuition in a public educational institution at the pre-primary and primary levels”.
In his State of the Nation presentation in the Upper House, Crawford said he has engaged legal counsel to seek a declaration from the court that the Government, through its failure to construct sufficient pre-primary institutions across the 14 parishes of the country abrogates, abridges and infringes the guaranteed constitutional rights set out in the Constitution.
“We want for the courts to tell us if it is constitutional, based on Section 13(K), that a child with a right to a government institution is not being robbed of that right if the Government at the early stage of zero to three has six per cent spaces and at the second stage of three to six has 15 per cent of the space,” he contended.
According to Crawford, of the 2,676 early childhood institutions that apply for registration, it is reported that only 408 or 15.2 per cent are identified as public institutions fully funded by the Government.
“How could 15 per cent satisfy that right?” questioned Crawford, who is the opposition spokesman on education.
Turning to the Ministry of Education’s Brain Builders programme, which focuses on the zero to three-year-olds, Crawford said that it has only 6,000 spaces. He said that the age cohort for this programme is 105,000.
“That means that Brain Builders is less than six per cent of the cohort from zero to three years old,” he said.
He called for dramatic investments in education to make meaningful improvements in the performance of students.
“Because the JLP (the governing Jamaica Labour Party) has tried so hard for me not to change policy in Parliament, then I have to go to the courts to change that policy,” Crawford said.