Education in Guyana

I thought that today I would share some of the things I have learned about the education system here in Guyana.  Some of this will make you teachers out there weep and hopefully make you appreciate the wonderful resources we have in the UK.  It has certainly had that effect on me!   I know this blog is longer than usual but please persevere and read it all. 

Children are offered a free education from the age of 3 – 16 – they go to nursery from 3 – 5; Primary school from 5 – 11 and then Secondary school – the Secondary school they attend is based on the results of their tests at the end of Primary school.  It is a real blessing that education is freely provided along with a set of uniform if the family is too poor to buy it themselves.  However, I have noticed that the schools are greatly under resourced – they do get a small amount of funding from the government but it is certainly not enough.  Children are meant to provide their own resources such as pens, pencils etc but many families can’t afford it so their children just have to beg and borrow pencils from a friend.  I have seen children sitting in class taking it in turns to write as they are sharing a pencil.  L

The schools consist of large wooden buildings usually with two stories – downstairs for the younger pupils and upstairs for the older ones.  They are basically large bare rooms divided into ‘classrooms’ by blackboards and children sitting in rows on benches. 

An example of a 'classroom' this would be one class within a large room consisting of 5 other classes.

A typical school building - the younger children are downstairs and the older ones are upstairs.

I have been teaching phonics at one school for the past few months and have discovered some of the difficulties faced by the teachers.  Here are some of them:

·        Noise carries from the neighbouring classes so it is difficult to make yourself heard over the din. 

·        Children are sitting in rows on benches and there is no area to gather them together on a carpet for input. 

·        Blackboards are not easy to write on and nothing shows up clearly as they are very old.

·        There are frequent power cuts so it is often dark when the lights go off, especially on cloudy and rainy days.

·        There are no resources such as computers, textbooks, colouring equipment, photocopiers, libraries, reading books or games.  All they have are some exercise books and pencils and the teachers have a few copies of textbooks from which they copy onto the blackboards. 

·        There is no PE in schools – there is no equipment for it and no space for any games or activities inside or out.   They have a recess in the morning and a lunch hour, but the times in-between consist of children sitting for long periods of time on their benches with nothing active to break up the day.

·        Not all the children come to school every day – they stay at home if their parents need them to work, if it is raining heavily (a lot don’t have proper shoes or waterproofs and the roads get very wet and muddy particularly in the rainy seasons).  This means that children often miss huge chunks of work and never catch up. 

·        Many of the children do not have anything to eat or drink all day - they may come to school having had no breakfast and then have nothing with them for lunch either.  Some of them just bring sugary snacks or drinks or crisps for their lunch, which have no nutritional value but are cheap to buy here.  This has to affect their learning. 

I have also discovered other things, which are stacked against the children getting a good education:

·        Teachers do not necessarily have good qualifications themselves – in the school where I am teaching of over 400 pupils, only one teacher has a degree, the rest are learning on the job.  Someone can become an ‘assistant mistress’ straight from school and begin teaching a class – they earn about £100 a month.  Once they have trained sufficiently they can become a ‘senior mistress’ and then they could earn up to £200 a month.  The poor reading skills of the teachers clearly has an impact on the children in their care and it is no surprise that literacy levels here are so low.

·        The teachers do not interact with the children – from what I have observed in the other classes, teachers write questions or text on the board to be copied but don’t give input or ongoing feedback during the lesson.  All the teachers I have observed simply sit at their desks marking or staring out of the window or texting (!) while the children copy from the board.  Sometimes the children are required to recite things together from the board. 

·        There is no interaction at all between parents and teachers – they do not have parent/teacher consultations and apparently if a parent goes into school because of a problem their child is experiencing the teachers then victimise the child so parents stay well away.  The children walk to and from school on their own and are not collected by an adult even when they are very young.  You often see even very small children walking along the roads (some of them extremely busy and dangerous roads) many of them without proper shoes. 

·        I have been told that some years ago the government removed reading from the curriculum but then after a few years realised that everyone was leaving school unable to read so it has recently been reintroduced.  The children are simply taught letter names and have no tools with which to decode words.  They just learn spellings by rote and have no idea how to work out a spelling for themselves. 

·        There is no music, art, RE, ICT, history or PSHE on the Primary curriculum. 

·        There is no training for teachers in the area of behaviour management or raising the self-esteem of children.  Children who have done wrong are humiliated and possibly smacked and there is no discussion of the wrongdoing or how to prevent it.  I had a boy in my class group last week who had kicked a girl and been smacked and sent back to my class – he was crying hysterically and told to ‘shut his mouth’ by the teacher.  After my input I sat with him to ask what had happened and tried to talk to him about why what he had done was wrong and strategies to cope next time he got angry.  I felt inadequate really but can only do what I can to help the odd individual.  

·        There are children being abused physically and sexually within the schools and a lot of incest because of families living in such cramped living conditions, but this is largely ignored. 

We are now supporting seven different schools in this area – 5 Primary and 2 Secondary – through doing lunchtime clubs and devotions (what we would call an assembly back home).  I am also doing phonics teaching with some year 4s and year 6s who cannot yet read.  I also have several teacher training sessions planned on phonics and behaviour management and raising self-esteem.  I have also been asked to lead a phonics training session in our local nursery school.  In addition, as a long term project over the next year, I am planning to write a safeguarding policy which I am going to try to instigate amongst the churches and subsequently the schools.  Once I have done the policy I am going to offer training for staff in this area and intend to contact the head of child services in the capital to seek help and awareness for the abused children across the country.

It feels like an overwhelming task to try to even begin to unravel all these problems and I know I can only touch the tip of the iceberg.  Please pray for me to be guided to the right children, teachers and organisations to be as effective as I can be during the next two years.