Continuous improvements: Minister Kumar
“The education sector requires continuous improvements in policies and curriculum to meet the needs of the learners and the workforce.” This was highlighted by Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, and Local Government, Premila Kumar, while speaking on the current status of the Curriculum Advisory Services with respect to the development of curricula to meet the needs of children during the Parliament sitting last week.
The Curriculum Advisory Services was restructured in 2020 and is now called Curriculum Development
and Advisory Unit.
The CDAU has the role of developing, implementing and reviewing the relevant curriculum with appropriate learning and teaching resources.
Minister Kumar added the Fiji National Curriculum Framework sets the education philosophy, structure, content and guiding principle for the unit.
“Over the past several months, the Curriculum Development Advisory Unit has been working on a number of curriculum revisions. In 2021, the new Year 11 Life Maths curriculum was trialled in the four divisions.”
“We are also in the process of revising social science and history curriculum. This is to ensure that our history curriculum is relevant with more emphasis on Fiji’s history.”
Minister Kumar added that unfortunately children tend to learn more about other country’s history than Fiji’s history and the Ministry wants to change that.
“The Curriculum Development Advisory Unit has been working on Primary School Literacy and Numeracy curriculum over the past couple of years. Currently the Years 1-4 curriculum is being trialled in 90 schools across the country.”
“This also involves the training of champions in these schools who would lead the implementation using new pedagogies in teaching these subjects and this is for the first time that special information is prepared for parents who would like to guide their children at home in the area of numeracy and literacy.”
Minister Kumar said going forward, the Fijian Government wants to ensure that they revise all the curriculum, modernise the pedagogies and create curriculum that could be used to create online learning resources and allow students to take charge of the learning hence, meeting the needs of our children.