Education Law Playing Catch-Up as Government Tables New Bill

Education reform is already happening across Belize, but Minister Francis Fonseca says the law has been lagging behind. Today, alongside the ITVET Bill, Fonseca introduced a new Education Bill that seeks to replace the Education and Training Act. He says the goal is to modernize the legal framework governing education and match it with the reforms and initiatives his ministry has been rolling out countrywide. According to Fonseca, the bill was shaped through consultations with education stakeholders and is intended to bring Belize’s education system under a more current and responsive law.

 

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education

“At the heart of this bill is a reflection and understanding that the education system has really outgrown its legal foundation. Over the past five plus years, we have introduced a number of important new initiatives, policy reforms. We have for example initiated and launched the Education Upliftment Project, the free tuition project. Tuition is a component, but it is much broader than tuition. We have also established the national feeding program, the Connect Ed Program where we have expanded wifi access to hundreds of schools across the country. We have also put in place a new competency-based curriculum framework. We have introduced new licensing, a new licensing regime and we have also introduced most recently a new national assessment framework. So, another new initiatives and reforms and the legislations has not been keeping up with the initiatives and reforms. And that really is the central objective of this education bill.”

 

The bill also preserves and strengthen that long standing church-state partnership.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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