Barbados Faces Challenges in Education Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

While Barbadians were rightly concerned with loss of employment, reviving the devastated tourism sector and ensuring Barbadians survived the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that the country may have taken its collective eyes off the ball when it came to the impact of the pandemic on the education of our children.

The leadership in many countries were distracted by the misinformation and disinformation campaigns about the COVID vaccines. Admittedly, there were some adverse effects, but for most people, the precautions of vaccines, social distancing and face covering helped to save millions of lives.

We should also not trivialise the illness and death that the pandemic brought to the doorsteps of hundreds of Barbadian homes.

According to the global tracker of COVID-19, 110 578 cases of the disease were reported in Barbados, with 108 647 recoveries and, sadly, 648 deaths.

The local economy suffered its worst downturn in modern history with almost every sector in decline except for international business, with the revenue from corporate taxes from the sector playing a critical role in sustaining the economy during that dreaded period.

A May 5, 2020 release from the Central Bank of Barbados said in the first quarter there was a dramatic change in the local and global economic and financial landscape.

“The deadly coronavirus pandemic has spread rapidly, forcing countries to adopt various restrictive measures, including closing their borders temporarily to international travel, enforcing public orders to shut down businesses and for persons to remain indoors . . . . These developments have adversely impacted the Barbados economy, which was previously expected to build on the gains of 2019.”

As the education of our children was put on hold while Ministry officials sought to transition to the online modality of teaching and learning, parents were left to employ methods to keep their children engaged and safe from illness.

During 2020 and 2021, the education of thousands of Barbadian children was set back, some argued, to a degree that is near impossible to regain or could take decades to recover.

What do the raw statistics uncover? Stacy N. J. Blackman, in an article published in 2021 by the National Library of Medicine’s National Centre for Biotechnology Information, examined The Impact of COVID-19 on Education Equity: A view from Barbados and Jamaica.

Focusing on the effect of school closures in Barbados and Jamaica, gender disparity and the responses of the Ministries of Education, she found that more males than females were out of school in primary and secondary schools in the two countries.

“Countries within the Caribbean are some of the most vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19 on both health and education. Not only could education loss result in higher attrition and retention rates for vulnerable students, but long term, it could also result in a reduction in economic participation and in even higher rates of unemployment among youth,” Blackman wrote.

According to the statistics, 26 822 males and 30 708 females were out of school due to COVID-19 pandemic closures. We recall that schools in Barbados formed an integral part of the isolation facilities infrastructure for those infected with the disease.

The poor educational outcomes that were predicted by the academics appear to be showing up on a scale that is deeply troubling to education planners.

The deterioration in the level of literacy in Barbados is being acknowledged and officials are citing the extended period when face-to-face classes were stopped.

With the definition of literacy extended to include a person’s capacity to understand; digital literacy, and informational literacy along with all the skills necessary for workplace functioning, Chief Education Officer Dr Ramona Archer-Bradshaw highlighted some of the ministry’s responses to the growing problem.

“From January this year, the Ministry of Education tasked the Erdiston Teachers’ Training College with rolling out courses and programmes in the teaching of reading, to help our teachers be on the cutting edge in terms of their delivery.

“In addition to that, we have embarked on ensuring that our education officers and some of our very outstanding teachers across the system can access the training. We sent some of them to Jamaica to engage in the Lindamood Bell training, and that would indeed teach them how to teach reading in a more structured way,” she outlined.

Though we applaud the ministry’s action plan, we fear that it is too delayed a process to help the scores of Barbadian children who have fallen through the cracks and may become long-term society problems for the country.