Parliamentarians encouraged to speed up passage of JTC Bill

  

The Education Transformation and Oversight Committee is urging parliamentarians to move briskly in passing the Jamaica Teaching Council Bill.

 

The Joint Select Committee of Parliament has been examining the bill since February 2022.

 

Providing an update on the 365 recommendations in the Orlando Patterson-led Reform of Education in Jamaica, 2021 Report, Chairman of the Committee, Dr. Adrian Stokes, said the bill is the only initiative lagging. 

 

"Let me use this platform to encourage the minister along with her parliamentary colleagues to move with alacrity, minister, to finalise the review process and to pass the bill so that we can begin to see the benefits of the legislation in the education sector," he urged.   

 

Dr. Stokes said, of the 136 recommendations on which work is ongoing, seven have been finalised, while progress is being made in the other areas. 

 

"Just to give you a sense of what they are: the structural review of the National Council on Education to strengthen its capacity, the other initiative to prepare and disseminate NEI inspection reports. There was an initiative as well in terms of to make public reports and schools' financials, conducting an institutional review of the Early Childhood Commission, request approval for increased budget to support in-service training of practitioners at the Early Childhood Level, training of TVET officers and work to improve capacity of pre-service teachers at all levels of the education system," he outlined.   

 

Responding to the call to expedite the Jamaica Teaching Council Bill, Minister of Education Fayval Williams said the Joint Select Committee has completed its report.

 

Mrs. Williams explained that the report, which will form the final bill, has been reviewed and amended.

 

But she said the process has been slow going given the number of concerns raised by stakeholders. 

 

"...We are going to have to withdraw the current one that's tabled at Parliament because there were so many changes and those changes came about as well because we allowed a period when organisations, individual persons could come into Parliament and bring a submission that says, I don't agree with what's in this current bill here... and we sat and listened, took notes and then after the process was completed, we had to go through all those submissions and decide whether or not we could incorporate them in the bill."

 

"So I'm only saying all of that because it's a very time consuming process that we have to go through. We could have just gone to Parliament, laid the bill, discussed it and passed it, but given the significance of the bill and the fact that this was called for more than 20 years ago, we had to allow this broad consultation of it," she sought to explain. 

 

The bill will establish the Council as the lone body to license teachers.