Bunting wants greater investment in early childhood education

WESTERN BUREAU:

Peter Bunting, the Opposition spokesman on education, wants more emphasis to be placed on improving the quality of education in the early-childhood sector instead of seeking to play catch-up in later years.

“Roughly three to four per cent of the education budget is spent on early childhood, and even if we adjust the amount for the size of the student cohort, you will probably have five times as much being spent per student, per year, in the primary and secondary schools. But that is actually a poor investment,” said Bunting while addressing the People’s National Party’s (PNP’s) ‘Shining a Light on Education’ series in Montego Bay.

According to Bunting, studies done over time have shown that the most important and formative years of a child are those between three and seven years old. However, he said, the early-childhood level remains the most unstructured and unprofessional sphere of the education sector. “So we mess up early childhood, then we try to remediate it at the primary and secondary levels, but the important thing is to get it right the first time. If we get it right at early childhood, then it will be so much easier at primary and secondary school,” he added.

US study

Citing the results of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Study, which was conducted by researchers in the United States’ Michigan School District in 1962, Bunting said that students who were given high-quality preschool education were less likely to fall into crime.

“The researchers took a cohort of three-year-olds, divided them into two groups, and exposed one group to high-quality preschool education, while the other group did what they wanted, and they tracked them for 40 years. The biggest return was in keeping the students out of trouble with law enforcement and keeping them from becoming criminals,” added Bunting.

Out of the Government’s J$853.5-billion Budget for the 2020-21 financial year, J$117 billion has been allocated to the education sector. Of that amount, based on Bunting’s calculations, approximately J$4.7 billion has been set aside for early-childhood education. This compares with the J$3.3 billion allotted to early-childhood education in the last financial year.

Bunting also pointed out that students need well-rounded training to qualify for a wide variety of jobs instead of being trained for specific types of employment that may later become redundant.

“When we are talking about a primary-school child today, we are saying that you are training him for a particular job when more than half the jobs that will be around when he graduates will be pointless,” said Bunting. “So you are not to train him for something particular, but instead, you are going to train him broadly enough that he can do anything. During the course of his lifetime, the student will probably change careers many times.”