The Impacts of Universal Secondary Education Policy on the rights of children in South Sudan
Rights of children on the Impacts of Universal Secondary Education Policy by the Ministry of General Education in South Sudan
By Lino Lual Lual, Juba, South Sudan
May 10, 2016 (SSB) — While other states have improved primary school education significantly, secondary education is still far behind the rest of the world in newest nation, Republic of South Sudan. South Sudan ministry of education has to formulate the only one curriculums for universal secondary education policy to improve secondary education using household panel data that will increased public secondary schools enrollments especially for girls from poor households.
South Sudan had been one of the lowest archiving regions in terms of education but primary school enrollment rates have increased in most of the states. These numbers could be biased since household surveys of States suggest that high levels of data are underestimation. The Ministry of Education must have committed to ensured that the teaching staff of every secondary school will have a minimum of 50% secondary trained teachers. Universal Secondary Education (USE) Strategy must always focus in on classroom teaching through the curriculum, materials, training and support for teachers.
A good curriculum with a bad teacher will produce a poor student, where as a bad curriculum with a good teacher is more likely to produce a successful student. Can the extensive programs of training and support that are proposed be extended to allow for diverse teaching situations, e.g. students with special needs or students whose progress may be slower than their peers? Strengthening teacher learning has to be a key goal for major proportion of the overall funding being allocated to training and support to the ministry of general education.
Professional development sessions are going to be required, delivered by trainers who are knowledgeable about the new curricula, and have a particular understanding of the issues of literacy and numeracy and opportunities for sharing good practice and solving implementation problems. In addition to providing more training for those already in the profession, the Universal Secondary Education (USE) Strategy will need to strengthen links with institutions that train new teachers.
- What analysis is being carried out to map out the specific needs of the teachers in the schools that are changing their status?
- Are programs being developed to ensure that newly qualified teachers enter secondary schools equipped to teach a different curricula and a different clientele?
- Is it possible to revisit the option whereby Primary certified teachers train to be qualified secondary teachers without going through the full Secondary training programme?
The number of girls who enrolls for the secondary schools is way behind of their counterpart and it was reported that lower secondary school age adolescents are still attending primary schools. Since then primary school fees must be adjust in government schools although South Sudan education system was mainly based on British education system because we were under British colonial rule. Some Christian missionaries started first missionary schools in South Sudan in early, but education was very limited and only urban elites benefited from it.
Moreover, access to education was very problematic under the colonial rule since most of the Southerners students were denied to enroll schools just because they are Africans. Therefore, improving primary education was the foremost interest since access to secondary schools required one must attend primary school first. But it did not improve the school enrollment rates significantly since financial burden remained very high for majority students to finish their p8.
Still in reality very few students can go beyond the primary education level due to financial burden of education even though primary school enrollment rates remained poor due to the political and economic instability in the country.
However, the quality of education provided to South Sudanese students still a questionable even as government tries to offer new subsidies to cover the education related cost, even School head teachers who are one of the important factor to succeed this policy are still confused of their ability and knowledge to implement their role. That’s why we cannot see a statistically coefficient estimate when we look at the girl’s results, it has large positive statistically may have benefited much more.
Among girls we can see a negative of assets values in which reflect the low assets holding values tend to enroll more in public secondary schools. Therefore, we can assume that only richer households could afford to send their daughters to public secondary schools as poor household parents might tend to focus more on boys secondary education because young girls usually marry earlier than boys and separate from their parents after marriage. Thus, may prefer to invest more on their son’s secondary education than that of their daughters, this result might prove the fact that after introducing USE policy most of the poor students entered public secondary schools but not private secondary schools.
The author is a master of strategic studies at Centre for Peace and Development Studies University of Juba, He can be reached via Linolual69@yahoo.com
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