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Editorial | Serious matters for Budget Debate

Published:Thursday | March 10, 2022 | 12:08 AM

HOPEFULLY, THE debate that Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke opened this week on the Government’s Budget for the new fiscal year will catalyse serious policy discourse, especially on matters consequential to Jamaica’s future. The times and the circumstances demand it.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised the spectre of conflict between Moscow and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance and a new Cold War, international relations were fraught. America made it known that it considered rising China a strategic competitor, whose ambitions it was keen to contain. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic not only threw the world into recession, but reopened questions about globalisation that were hitherto thought settled. Now, the war in Eastern Europe is adding a new energy crisis to the cornucopia of issues.

In this environment, the windy political point-scoring and lowbrow theatre that usually pass for debate on the Budget simply will not do. And insofar as it has already happened, it should stop. There are too many fundamental matters critical to Jamaica’s short-, medium- and long-term survival to be addressed, including how the country might accelerate its conversion to renewable energy and wean itself off fossil fuels.

Indeed, a fortnight ago, alternative energy might have been considered an important but not necessarily urgent issue. But at that time, Dr Clarke had a Budget premised on oil costing US$75 a barrel. Oil is now trading at around US$130, with fears that it could claim substantially higher.

This is but one example of a problem that could jeopardise the island’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery and the possibility of extricating itself from historically puny growth, which was, in part, as much a reflection of low labour productivity as poor macro policies.

Quality of workforce

The short-term response to the productivity conundrum lies on many fronts. The core solution, however, rests with the quality of the country’s workforce; its capacity to be globally competitive. That, at its basic, is about education and training. And that suggests another topic that should be high on Parliament’s agenda during this Budget season.

Indeed, the Budget Debate is an excellent opportunity for Dr Clarke and Prime Minister Andrew Holness to initiate a robust discussion on the report by the Patterson Commission that considered how to transform Jamaica’s education. In the several months since the report’s publication, the Government and other critical stakeholders, including the teachers’ union, principals and parent-teacher groups, have been too quiet on its offerings.

Our suggestion, therefore, is that Prime Minister Holness, a former education minister, launch his intervention by explaining his administration’s thinking on one sector of education to which the Patterson Commission (which was led by the renowned sociologist Orlando Patterson) paid much attention and their recommendations are likely to generate the most controversy: early-childhood education. It will elicit contention not because of what they said about the sector’s needs, but their recommendation for how this might be financed – by shifting money from the tertiary and vocational sectors.

Poor return on investment

The poster images of Jamaica’s failure in education are, of course, well known – and oft repeated by this newspaper. The island spends, relatively, as much, and in some cases, more than its regional peers on education – over five per cent of GDP. The returns, however, are poor.

A third of students leave primary school illiterate; 56 per cent of grade-six students do not read well; and 57 per cent cannot extrapolate ideas from simple sentences. And while a bit over 40 per cent of the students who sit the Caribbean Examination Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams pass five subjects at a single sitting with maths or English, only 28 per cent do so with maths and English.

The upshot: a significant amount of Jamaica’s educational resources go into remediation, because we don’t get it right the first time – or early. A significant part of the problem the commission reported is the weak foundation upon which children start.

More than 95,000 children are enrolled in an early-childhood institution, representing over 93 per cent of the cohort, one of the world’s highest. But the quality of these institutions, mostly private, community-based schools, is mostly weak and the teachers largely untrained.

At the time of the report, of more than 2,200 early-childhood institutions in Jamaica, only 280 were fully certified and, according to the commission, “of the remainder, only 37 permits (1.4 per cent) are operating with a valid one-year permit”. The report proposes a massive overhaul of the sector, including the training of teachers and other support for institutions, which involves, where feasible, transforming underutilised schools into early-childhood facilities.

The Government, for the 2022-23 fiscal year, has allocated $5.1 billion (less than five per cent of the education spend) to pre-primary education. It would have to find substantially more than that to fulfil the recommendations of the Patterson Report, which said it could find some of the money from the HEART Trust/NSTA, the agency that finances vocational training with cash it receives by a payroll tax, but which has a problem with capacity utilisation. Some of the rest of the expenditure would also come from nicking bits from the tertiary sector.

Obviously, if we do not get it right at the early childhood level, it will be more difficult to get it right later on, which makes what the Patterson Commission has to say worthy of discussion – especially in these times.