Vanuatu student outlines education needs to 9th FEdMM

Port Vila, Vanuatu– A 14-year old Grade 8 student of Vanuatu has been given the opportunity of addressing a Forum Education Ministers’ Meeting on the education needs of Pacific islands children. Looking very confident, Mark Rory of Fresh Water School in Port Vila took the podium in front of the Prime Minister of Vanuatu and about 50 delegates including Forum Education Ministers, development partners, and representatives of CROP and United Nations agencies and other education stakeholders to outline what he believed are the learning needs of children in the region. “With the changing trends in the region, Pacific Island Governments strive to develop education policies geared to enhance, improve and sustain a quality of education in our region,” Rory said. “On this occasion, we children of Vanuatu on behalf of other Pacific islands children encourage our leaders to continue to discuss and find appropriate solutions to our needs.” Rory explained the needs as follows: • We will appreciate well trained teachers who are competent. • The Pacific island countries should continue to strengthen partnership at national and regional levels. An idea to set up process to exchange teaching skills and knowledge between pacific island teachers would be a positive step towards a sustainable quality education. • Furthermore, Pacific island countries curriculum and teaching resources are riches and deserve to be shared to build a holistic and uniform PACIFIC. • Our island nations can also set up processes for short term exchange programmes. • Language of instruction is a struggle for us students to have quality education. We need to have clear language policy in place to enable us to use our mother tongues to understand things and learn more effectively. During the two-day meeting, Forum Education Ministers will discuss education priorities for the region as well as several papers on topics including: • Pacific Professional Standards for Principals; • Pacific Benchmarking the Quality of Education for Results; • Regional Framework for ICT in Education in the Pacific; • A Regional Framework for Technical and Vocational Education and Training; and • Pacific Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management Education Framework ENDS. For media enquiries contact Mr Johnson Honimae, the Forum Secretariat’s Media Officer on phones: 678 5969592, 679 5969592 or email: johnsonh@forumsec.org.fj