Jamaica

Jamaica Gleaner
Early childhood nutritional support published:
Thursday October 6, 2005

IN MONDAY'S Cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister instructed that a team be assembled to work out a plan to ensure that children in early childhood educational institutions are provided with at least one nutritional meal each school day.

Having pulled $5 billion from the NHT Fund for the education transformation agenda, over strenuous objections from several quarters, the Prime Minister wants to deploy some of this funding to the most neglected segment of the education system.

The Government has had a low stake in early childhood education compared to other levels of the national education system. Most of the many hundreds of early childhood schools are charitable institutions operated by churches or other civic entities, or are marginal small businesses operated by persons who have no formal training in early childhood education.

Government does provide some assistance, mostly with the salaries of teachers, but the system is poorly-regulated and poorly-supervised. The Prime Minister's team for nutritional support to the children in early childhood education will start out with huge logistic difficulties for management and delivery.

The critical importance of this base level of the education system has been underscored by several analysts. The Government seems to be slowly awakening to this reality and has taken several steps recently, such as the establishment of the Early Childhood Commission and Child Development Agency to respond to the needs of this sector.

Dr. Ralph Thompson, in closing his analysis of the improvements in this year's CXC results in last Sunday's edition, pointed out that we are still performing at a 50 per cent deficit compared to our Caribbean counterparts. In the same edition of The Sunday Gleaner, Edward Seaga, who has emerged as something of an early childhood champion in his senior years, again underscored in his column the importance of facilitating the development of the human brain during the period of its most rapid development in early childhood.

Adequate nutrition is one of the critical factors in early childhood brain development. The Government has been supporting for years a school feeding programme at the primary level with some support at the secondary level. It is a real 'revolutionary' step to take the nutritional support down to the level where it matters most in terms of the mental development of children and their readiness for learning and for life. When this is accompanied by richer stimulation and more competent teacher performance by better trained teachers we can expect very positive results.

Every government wants to assist the poor in particular. One of the best forms of long-term assistance is to help their children to perform better in school and to escape the cycle of poverty through education. A legacy of doing this is of greater substance than highways.