Opening Remarks,
Chair,
National Commission for UNESCO, Dr Kris Rampersad at
Leading for Literacy Now! training workshop
Sister
Francis Xavier Heritage Hall, Abercromby Street, Port of Spain
19August
2013
Culling Leaders for LiteracyMine is
the pleasure to welcome you to the opening of this round of training in our
project leading for literacy now, on behalf of the Trinidad and Tobago National
Commission for UNESCO.
This
project, Leading for Literacy Now, represents what we envision as the ideal
blend of commitment, energy and drive in taking responsibility and taking
action in transforming our society and the spaces we occupy, improving our
communities and lifting the life chances of the youngsters and next generation
of leaders in our charge.
You may
well recognise the urgency we ascribe to this intervention, as we seek
solutions to cull leaders for literacy, Now, as indeed - all of us must surely
be attuned to the news - for every minute that we lose focus we run the risk of
losing another child to one of the many delinquencies and distractions that
compete for their attention.
With its
ideal mix of stakeholders – it includes a confluence of vision and energies – funding
support from UNESCO’s international participation programme and the Ministry of Education to meet our
budget for this pilot exercise of almost
six hundred and sixty two thousand, dollars ($661,720.00), one quarter of
which comes from UNESCO’s funds and the
remaining three quarters from the Ministry of Education, and indeed we must
thank the Minister of Education for his wholehearted endorsement of this
endeavour.
This
leading for Literacy Now! project, represents an exercise in our collective as
well as individual responsibility evident in the commitment of the policy and
decision makers in the Minister of Education, Dr Gopeesingh who has provided
unflinching support not just in funding approval but also in the involvement of
technical staff of his Ministry; the engagement of technical expertise of the
UK-based National College for School Leadership; principals and teachers and of
course we at the National Commission and especially the very hard working and
committed team of its education sector committee, headed by Mrs Crouch, and
including:
Mr Bhadase
Seetahal Maraj from the Ministry of Education; Dr Sandra Gift of the University
of the West Indies; Mrs Shayphan Smith of the Ministry of Tertiary Education; Ms.
Lucia Phillip, Executive Director of NALIS; Mrs Liseli Daaga with broad community
and NGO experience; alongside the work of the secretariat led by Ms Susan
Shurland; Programme Officer Ms. Hannah Katwaroo; and Research Assistant Mr.
Sean Garcia.
I
particularly look forward to the session on risk management and leadership
drill with the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment, that certainly is an example of
the out of-the-box synergies required to make be effective and make an impact,
by engagement other national agencies and institutions in our efforts to Lead
for Literacy, Now!
This project
forms part of the UNESCO “10,000 Principals Leadership Programme” launched by
the UNESCO’s Director General Irina Bokova in 2011 as a global project to
improve the quality of teaching and learning opportunities for children. It
envisions training of some 10,000 principals with the intended multiplier
effect to benefit thousands of teachers and principals and millions children
across the globe.
Our National Commission has literacy as a top priority of our national
agenda, as it is in among the Ministry of Education’s 16 national priority
focus areas for education.
In this context, earlier this year the Commission unanimously took a
decision to contextualise this project within what we declared as A Decade for
Literacy, endorsed by the Ministry of Education, as we well recognise that it
does not end here with the end of this course next Sunday or the end of the
pilot a few months hence.
Indeed, it is only a beginning as we task you with taking your learnings
from here, into your schools and communities, tooled with the core training
activities that speak directly to some of those urgent needs within our society
for leaders, for which the schools that are in your charge are the incubators,
hence the inclusion of such topics as team building, organisational management,
using and generating research and data, and certainly what we have been seeing
as greater and greater needs in the dynamic environment in which we function
today - risk management and most importantly managing change.
Beyond the immediate intentions of providing you - principals and
teachers - with leadership skills so you return to the new school term with new
tools to improve reading standards among students, this places you at the
forefront of the agenda for change and transformation of our society into the
next decade – you are not just influencers of the process, you are the
transformers of it!
We have been following keenly the sharing of knowledge and ideas that have
been taking place on our Leading for Literacy Now! web platform and are
inspired by the cross fertilisation of ideas and energies. We encourage you to not
only keep up the dialogue, but translate it into actions within your own spheres
so that one of the outcomes of this programme can be the boast of all of us that,
under our watch no child was left behind.
For our part at the National Commission, given the commitment we have
seen to this project and the unwavering support of all concerned, we anticipate
such successes that we are looking to pitch this as a model project that can be
adapted for our Caribbean counterparts as well as indeed the global community of
UNESCO which maintains education among the five key pillars of its focus
including communications and information, science, culture, and social and
human sciences.
We look forward to receiving your reflections on this and
recommendations at the end of this exercise and certainly look forward to the
greatly empowered role you will play when the new school terms begins next
week.
I thank you.
