MINISTER for Education and Member of Parliament for Gizo/Kolobangara has outlined the four key policy areas of her ministry in parliament last week.
She said her ministry has developed and will implement the four key policy areas.
“First, MEHRD will endeavour to ensure full recovery from COVID – 19 education disruptions. We know student learning loss occurred during the closure of schools and would like to take stock of and identify additional targeted actions needed to ensure full learning recovery.
“The second redirection reform policy is; to identify the main strategic transformations and levers for reimaging education for the 21 century and accelerating progress towards our shared education goals, which we have set.
“Thirdly, and as I alluded to earlier on, our ministry needs to ensure to strengthen a more sustainable public financing of education.
“The fourth challenge we as a ministry has been grappling with and would like to focus more on is to raise the quality of education and benchmarks,” she said.
She added the ministry has an obligation to achieve the SDG 4 targets.
For example, the SDG targets are skills development, youth and adult literacy, higher education, enrolment, vocational and tertiary education.
“We lag behind in terms of setting our SDG 4 benchmarks including the indicators on gender equity,” she said.
She alluded that student learning loss occurred during the closure of schools.
In this case the ministry would like to take stock of and identify additional targeted actions needed ensure full learning recovery.
Since 2015, UNESCO Member States agreed on a level of educational funding of 4 to 6% of GDP or 15 to 20% of public expenditure.
“I am happy to inform this House that since 2016, the level of educational funding by the national government is within the international benchmark of 15 to 20% of public expenditure.
“In fact the SIG allocation to education is between 20% and 30% annually for the past three years,” she said.
Nevertheless, the demand for quality education is increasing due to increase in population and costs, therefore we need to conduct further studies to determine financing of our school system especially and determine the costs for quality education she added.
By LACHLAN EDDIE
Newsroom, Honiara
