Constitutional reform and education system

THE AFTERMATH of SEA is a good introductory point to address the issue of constitutional reform as it pertains to the education system. Many education experts and commentators over the years have identified the SEA as an irrelevant and unnecessary high-stakes examination that only serves to perpetuate a two-tiered secondary school system that significantly assists in the continuance of a socio-economic class differential; a social order that benefits sectoral interests.

Thankfully, SEA 2024 is now a memory for just over 18,000 students, who the minister quite rightly reminded that it only signals the beginning of a new phase in their education journey and not the end.

Before the advent of universal secondary education, SEA and its previous incarnations were used as a metric to transition students onto secondary school owing to the limited number of available spaces. This evolved to a high-stakes test, thanks in large part to a curious provision in the Constitution wherein a parent has the right to choose the school to which his/her child attends. This gave rise to the annual evolution of a hierarchy of secondary schools based on factors of which most are extraneous to education.

Thus, parents were allowed to identify preferred secondary schools for their children to attend. To further complicate the enjoyment of this right enshrined in the Constitution was the Concordat, a document which also allowed schools to choose its students. Unfortunately, this right has never been enjoyed by the majority of parents for obvious impractical reasons, with the State simply placing the majority of students at secondary schools.

The net effect of these factors was the evolution of an education system that is defined by needless high-stakes examinations, starting with SEA, that essentially certifies more children as failures rather than successes based on the choice criteria.

This antiquated structure continues to restrict the capacity of the education system to evolve based on sound principles of equity and fairness and commensurate with the needs of the society. Educational investment in this configuration could not yield the desired dividends of enhanced human capital, despite huge sums invested and the consistent realisation that the system must be overhauled.

Interestingly, missing in the current battery of constitutional guarantees is the right of all children to quality education, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. While all children have been enjoying the right to free education at both primary and secondary levels for over two decades, there has always been the argument that owing to structures like SEA and the right of parents to choose schools, all children are unable to maximise benefits from free schooling owing to issues of equity.

The annual generation of a hierarchy of schools, courtesy of these "choices" based on parents’ perception, ensures that secondary school populations are essentially characterised by students from similar socio-economic backgrounds, reflecting existing societal stratification.

Unfortunately, when socially/economically marginalised students are lumped together into a school courtesy of SEA, and adequate resources/structures are not provided to compensate for the deficiency outcomes, educational failure is inadvertent. This reality has and continues to diminish the social and economic returns on our education investment and not just suffocates economic growth by preventing all citizens from realising their maximum human potential and consequential level of productivity, but by the outward expressions of diminished human capital in outcomes such as crime and its corollary of economic inefficiency.

Over the decades there has been no shortage of recommendations to enhance and improve the education system as a main vehicle of human development and economic progress based on sound, modern education principles, beginning with a major overhaul of its legislative framework, provided there is the political will to so do.

The current attempts at constitutional reform will hopefully be able to address this barrier to genuine educational reform to facilitate the evolution of an education system that is based on principles of equity and fairness; one that acknowledges that all children must have the right to free, quality public education, thus enabling them to be critical and innovative thinkers through the realisation of their maximum human potential.

This will ensure that the privileged position that some sectoral interests currently enjoy, that are inimical to the country’s interest, will be dismantled, much to their chagrin and political opposition. But political fortitude must prevail to do that which is in the best overall interest of the country. All schools must be able to offer quality education so there wouldn’t be the need for high-stakes tests like SEA.