Experts meet to set a new agenda to improve education in Small States

More than 50 education experts from 15 small states and international organisations will today start a five-day meeting in the Seychelles to discuss how to improve education in Commonwealth small states.  The meeting will start with a three day workshop on School Improvement Programmes in Small States (SIPSS) which will be followed by an expert consultation meeting that aims to set a new agenda for the activities of Commonwealth Small States in education and human development over the next decade.

Many Commonwealth countries use school improvement programmes (SIPs) to enable schools to exercise greater autonomy and take more responsibility for the quality and management of the learning process.  The workshop will look at the SIPs that have been used in the Seychelles for five years and also in several Caribbean countries with a view to showing how the programmes can be used to produce sustainable quality education for all.  The outcomes of the workshop will be published as training materials for design, implementation and management of new SIPs and for support of existing improvement programmes.

The three-day expert consultation meeting will focus on the unique problems faced by small states in education and human development and deal with issues arising from disadvantages of scale.  The consultation will also address new areas of concern such as information and communications technologies, distance education and open learning and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Conclusions from the meeting will be forwarded to Commonwealth Education Ministers who will be meeting in Canada in November 2000.

The two meetings have been organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat in collaboration with the Seychelles Ministry of Education and with the support of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the Department for International Development (Dfid) in the United Kingdom.  The experts attending the meetings come from Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, Lesotho, Malta, Mauritius, Papua New Guinea, St Lucia, Swaziland, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago and the Seychelles.  Representatives of the Caribbean Community, the Caribbean Examinations Council, the Organisation of East Caribbean States, the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO are also participating in the meetings.

Note to Editors:

Press contact:

Dr Cream Wright, Special Adviser and Head of Education,

Commonwealth Secretariat office

Mahe

Telephone 00 248 361 656

Fax 00 248 361 657