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| Photo caption: Premier and Minister of Education in the Nevis Island Administration Hon Joseph Parry. |
CHARLESTOWN NEVIS (August 15, 2006) -- Change is on the way for the education system on Nevis. Premier and Minister of Education Hon Joseph Parry said a new policy approach to the development of education would be available in three months at the end of a number of consultative meetings.
Mr Parry told the Government Information Service following the first meeting at the Cabinet Room at Bath Plains on Monday July 14th, 2006, that Mr Ashley Farrell Cabinet Secretary, Mr Elvin Bailey Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education and other persons involved in education administration and policy making on Nevis, were briefed on what the Nevis Reformation Party (NRP) Government's approach to education would be and what their concerns were.
"Persons are going to prepare papers and over a period of maybe 10 weeks to three months we hope to have a whole new policy approach to the development of education on Nevis," Mr Parry said.
The Minister of Education also outlined some of the issues for discussion including the separation of the Sixth Form College from the Charlestown Secondary School and the drop out rate of children from all schools in Nevis.
"I mentioned, of course, that we believe we need to separate the Sixth Form from the Charlestown Secondary School; we also need to look at the drop out rates of children from all the schools; we need to look at the comprehensive system and make it more useful and meaningful to young people in our society and we need to establish a tertiary training unit in the country. We discussed the state of the school yards and the state of the classrooms and what we need to do to encourage teachers to be more proactive. We also looked at the new trend of parents attacking teachers and being aggressive towards teachers at the workplace.
"The second thing that we started to discuss and it will continue next week is that we wanted to look at the programmes for the upcoming school term, school text books, preparation of the school plans and how we are going to place the children, how we are going to place the teachers and how we can improve the education system in the short term," Mr parry explained.
