Minister of Education and Youth, Fayval Williams has promised progress within the education sector in an address at the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) 60th Annual Conference in Trelawny on Wednesday, August 21.

“We both want the same things,” she said, “an educational system that works for our students, teachers and administrators. An educational  in which the infrastructure works in our schools — is not the headache of the board and our principals, but is those responsible for sticking to a planned and transparent scheduled flow of work across the system.”

Williams outlined that there’s room for improvement within the sector and expressed hopes that the partnership between the JTA and the Education Ministry will continue to bear fruit.

“We know there is more to be done ahead of us, more to be done than has been done,” said Williams, “We are guided now by the Jamaica Education Transformation report…it spells out in a very granular way, all the recommendations that we should be implementing in order to improve the education system and the education outcomes of our nations.”

Minister Williams noted that the 365 recommendations listed within the report came from those in the field of education and other stakeholders.

“We have been faithful to implementation of those recommendations… we have begun,” she added. “We are not claiming success or perfection yet. We are here to say we have taken it on in earnest, to do the work that needs to be done.”

She noted that the education sector is the largest in the country with 1009 public schools, 2,431 early childhood institutions, 500 prep and private high schools, and 21 tertiary institutions with 600,000 students.

The ministry’s commitment includes modernising its administrative system within the central ministry and regions. She also mentioned increasing digitisation to enable optimal efficiency. Minister Williams mentioned plans to amend current regulations and legislation to make them more “relevant to our current realities”, and increase the ministry’s budgetary allocations.

“We have to make the systems efficient in order to serve the system,” she said. “It is a very large system that in 2024 still has significant manual work that we have to eliminate, that we have to digitise in order for the ministry as an administrative body to serve the sector well.”

Williams said that she hopes the changes that have been made are recognised by the masses, though they have only just begun.