2 hours Ago By Fred Wesley
Why are so many students dropping out early? The revelation that about 4589 students dropped out of the formal education system before completing primary education, and 5726 left before completing Year 10, between 2019 and 2023 is cause for concern. Education Minister Aseri Radrodro revealed the figures in a written response during this month’s Parliament sitting. He was responding to Opposition Member of Parliament Hem Chand.
Contributing factors, Mr Radrodro said, were multifaceted. He said while specific reasons for dropouts were not registered, reasons that were disclosed at school level include “demise”, migration, public school to private school movement, formal and informal employment, and medical conditions. It is difficult to comprehend the numbers when education over the years has actually been getting quite a huge budgetary allocation annually.
According to Mr Chand, since the inception of the Free Education Grant 10 years ago, government had invested around $650 million to 738 primary, 176 secondary and more than 870 early childhood education (ECE) schools. Now that is quite a huge sum. The question now is what happened along the way? What did we do wrong? With so much emphasis being placed on education, it is a concern that students are still dropping out at primary level.
That does place pressure on our future as a nation. The United Nations sees education as the basic building block of every society. It is the single best investment countries can make to build prosperous, healthy and equitable societies.
It points to Article 26 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states: “Everyone has the right to education.” Education, it says, is not only a right, but a passport to human development that opens doors and expands opportunities and freedoms. Those who leave school at an early age, it warns, are vulnerable to unemployment, poverty, early marriage, and pregnancy.
It notes some of the factors that fuel drop-out rates include poverty, gender, disability, family catastrophes, war and conflict, as well as perceived low return on investment for education. That’s on a global scale. Our challenge is to try and understand what it is that’s keeping our children away here in Fiji, and coming up with appropriate action to address this concern.
We need to be talking about it at all levels of society. That means taking it to families, communities and discussing this at the national level. We have a situation that threatens the future of our youth, and our nation.
The challenges we are facing are significant but they certainly are not insurmountable! We have said this before, to the powers that be, there will need to be attention focused on addressing teacher shortage, improving work conditions, and focusing on literacy. We reflect also on the need for us to understand the challenges families are facing, and how we can encourage parental engagement. We have always said that education is important for the development of a nation.
So we must take decisive action now. The goal should be to educate our children!.
