Opposition Members of Parliament, Gordon Barker of the WIN party and Coretta Mc Donald of the APNU went head-to-head yesterday with Education Minister Sonia Parag on budgetary allocations for the Education Ministry, and the state of the Education sector.

MP Barker questioned the Government’s school feeding programme and the quality of meals being provided to students. He said he believes the money being spent on that programme ought to go directly to parents to assist them in preparing better quality meals for their children.

He also called out the Education Ministry for not putting systems in place to ensure that longstanding issue of promotion of teachers.

“Mr. Speaker, no education system can rise above the quality morale and stability of its teachers, yet when we examine allocations related to the Teaching Service Commission and teacher management, we observe a glaring silence on the several critical issues for example backlog in promotions which hinders the pension and gratuity payments said to teachers upon retirement,” Barker stated.

For her part, APNU, Member of Parliament Coretta Mc Donald, who is also the President of the Guyana Teachers’ Union, noted that while the government’s budget has been increasing yearly, the budget for the education sector has been increasing only by 2% while much work is still to be done in the sector.

“Mr. Speaker, these numbers demonstrate that while education spending has increased in absolute terms, it has failed to keep pace with the national budget. The result is that education is not being prioritize despite repeated claims to the contrary,” Ms. Mc Donald noted.

In response, Education Minister Sonia Parag said the Government has been investing wisely in the sector and will continue to do so.

“We have a five-year plan and every single year we invest money in that space to ensure that we will be able to deliver on our policies and our programmes beginning with 2026 for the next five years, and priority has always been placed on the education sector by the People’s Progressive Party Civc government,” Ms. Parag stated.

Mc. Donald also questioned Government’s education infrastructure push, stating that many of the schools which were recently built and or rehabilitated by government, are already facing challenges.

“Mr. Speaker, with all the trillions and budget theme after budget theme, our children are still suffering, they are falling ill from eating stale food. Mr. Speaker, the state-of the art, Brickdam secondary school two weeks was leaking, at Port Kaituma school, the teachers and parents stage a sit out over the filthy state of the classroom at Corentyne Comprehensive, there is no running water in that school, toilets could not be flushed and no electricity in the grades 7 and 8 blocks,” Mc Donald decried.

In response, the Education Minister admitted that while there are infrastructural challenges, mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that those challenges are rectified.  

“We have schools with infrastructure problems and I am not going to stand here and deny that we have issues but hear is what Mr. Speaker, once an issue is reported to us, we will go and fix it, similar to how our houses have issues with windows and toilets it is the same with the schools that have hundreds of children in them, but we are going to fix the problems, that is why we have allocations in the budget to fix them,” the Education Minister stated.

The Minister also stated that the Teaching Service Commission will soon be filling some 1,500 vacancies in the system and teachers eligible for promotions will be promoted.

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