Morobe’s district education officials and elementary teachers gathered today at Ampo, in Lae, for the ‘Eco seminar on conversion program’.
The event aimed to introduce to education officials and teachers the conversion of elementary schools to early childhood education centres under the standards-based curriculum.
The outcome-based education (OBE) system, which was introduced in 2000, and had its first syllabuses published in 2003, was widely considered a failed concept.
Following public outcry, the then O’Neill-Dion government, in 2018, directed the Department of Education to abolish OBE in schools in the country.
The new curriculum, called standards-based curriculum (SBC), is now being used and under it, elementary schools will be converted to early childhood education centres under the 3-6-6 education structure.
This structure will see children, aged 4-6, undergo kindergarten 1 and 2, then on to preparatory grade. From there, they will move on to grades 1-6, then 7-12.
School inspectors, district education managers, provincial education managers and elementary school teachers from Morobe Province attended a one-day seminar today at Ampo, for an introduction on the conversion, early childhood education curriculum and policies.
“In this area, my team of trainers and I will be concentrating on training early childhood teachers, qualifying them to teach in an early childhood setting,” said the Morobe provincial teacher training coordinator, Mathias Mutengke.
“At the same time, we will provide conversion in-service training for our previous, existing elementary teachers; retrain them with early childhood methods and ways of teaching.”
Mutengke and his team have recently undergone a three-month induction in Port Moresby, where they have furnished a full report to the provincial authority. The second phase of the early childhood education rollout is the hosting of the eco seminar.
“After this now, the next plan is to take on this information, right throughout the 10 districts of Morobe, conducting full awareness to our teachers, boards of management, community leaders, parents and citizens.
“Once that is done, and all stakeholders are fully aware of how early childhood education will be rolled out, then the next step to conduct next year is to re-train all the elementary teachers; convert them to ECE teachers.
“Once that is done, early childhood education will be fully rolled out and our job now will be to supervise and monitor.”