Analysis of 2021 data on student retention and attrition of students indicates that student dropouts are gradually decreasing in the region.
Data collected by the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Institute of Statistics shows that less than 3% of primary school-aged children and a third of adolescents and youth of secondary age in the Pacific Islands are not enrolled in school.
However, qualitative data from the region suggests that increasing dropout rates – at different levels of the education system – still pose a significant challenge for the education ministries in the region, according to the Pacific Community’s Educational Quality and Assessment Programme (EQAP).
In terms of student retention, EQAP says the latest available data shows that on average, 85% of students reach the last grade of primary education, while 15% of students drop out of primary education in selected Pacific Island countries. Data at the secondary school level is “not consistent to carry out the required analysis,” says EQAP.
Overall, the out-of-school rate is relatively low for smaller Pacific Island countries such as Niue, Tonga, and Samoa, but in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, a significant proportion of students are not enrolled in primary education.
The number of children not in school, is a major worry.
“How might we ensure that students
across the region receive high quality
education despite the impacts of
climate change and other related
challenges?”
EQAP Director, Dr Michelle Belisle
In PNG every year, an estimated 20,000 Grade 12 students don’t continue their education at tertiary level and are unaccounted for, and roughly 50,000 Grade 10 students don’t continue to Grade 11. Kelly Samof, economics lecturer with the University of Papua New Guinea, says this means the country will have about one million unemployed schoolleavers in 10 years’ time.
“There is a huge bulge of a youth population less than 30 years old in PNG,” says Samof.
Economist Naren Prasad, originally from Fiji and who is now the head of education and training at the International Labor Organization (ILO), wrote recently that migration of teachers also has the potential to affect education in the region, and that to ensure Pacific children get an equitable and highquality secondary education, “the curricular would need to be aligned with labour-market needs to avoid structural unemployment.”
He noted in the Oxford Handbook of Governance and Public Management for Social Policy published last year, that other challenges in the region relate to the quality of education in rural schools in particular, and financing management and building costs, “which depends on the community’s income level and results in poorly equipped schools in poor communities.”
Addressing International Day of Education celebrations in Suva last month, EQAP Director, Dr Michelle Belisle, put the challenge of delivering education to the region in the context of its development challenges.
“More than 45% of the population lacks access to basic drinking water facilities, and more than two thirds live without access to basic sanitation. In addition, drinking water and wastewater facilities are continuously impacted by the increase in extreme weather events, especially 60% of the region’s infrastructure [is] located within 500 meters of the coast. So, with those statistics in mind, how might we ensure that students across the region receive high quality education despite the impacts of climate change and other related challenges?” Belisle asked.
The Pacific Regional Education Framework (PacREF) is a regional initiative designed to support Pacific Island countries address their ongoing challenges to improving the quality of education. Endorsed at the Forum Education Minister Meeting (FEdMM) in 2018 for 15 Pacific Island country members, PacREF aims to identify shared challenges, develop solutions to address those challenges, improve student outcomes
and well-being, build the capacity of Pacific education institutions, and maximise shared resources.
Belisle says some of PacREF’s initiatives include updating regional standards for teachers and school leaders to ensure that the Pacific standards are relevant in the current context of the region. In addition to its ongoing work on the Pacific Islands literacy and numeracy assessment donor program, aimed at measuring and improving reading, writing and numeracy proficiency levels in primary school, EQAP is piloting a new Pacific assessment for the lower secondary level in each of the sub-regions of the Pacific, accrediting national and regional qualifications to ensure regional recognition of learning, and developing a regional research bank to improve the quality of education at all levels of learning.
At the International Day of Education celebrations in Suva last month, EQAP launched PILNA TV, a series of videos demonstrating best practice in the teaching of reading comprehension using the recommendations from the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) analysis in
2021.
The PILNA 2021 analysis of the situation in the Pacific found that Year Four students are not, on average, meeting the minimum expected performance levels; small decreases in reading performance were found in PILNA 2021 when compared with PILNA 2018 at both year levels “but it is unclear whether these are significant”; 53% of Year Six students met the minimum expected reading performance standards in 2021; girls scored higher than boys in average reading performance in 2021 at both year levels; and a larger
proportion of girls were meeting the minimum expected reading performance standards than boys at both year levels.
While organisations such as EQAP are taking measures to address learning challenges within the education system in the Pacific, there are concerns about the lack of alternatives for those students that drop out because they cannot meet the academic standards set by exams.
At the Fiji National Education Summit in Suva in July last year, there was discussion about introducing Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) at Year 7 or 8 level, as an alternative pathway for non-academically oriented students, given that about 40% of students who sit for the Year 8 (Secondary Entrance) Examination fail.
The concern is that these students are pushed into Year 9 and about the same number end up dropping out or failing in Year 10.
A discussion paper at the 2023 education summit pointed out that 5000 TVET scholarships were allocated for TVET studies at FNU but only 32% (1600) were taken up.
The remaining 3400 places were not used because Year 12 students needed to score a minimum of 250 out of a total of 400 marks, to qualify for the TVET Scholarship.
TVET advocates argue that the scholarships should target those that failed Years 4, 6 and 7, with lower qualifying marks to harness this section of the youth population into a productive workforce.
Long-time educators such as Dr Ganesh Chand, who has led the Solomon Islands National University and the Fiji National University, who established Pacific Polytech, a hands-on technical college in Fiji last year, are concerned that nothing is being done to address these concerns.
“Those with critical thinking learnings in the education sector need to be given space to articulate where we are, and where we need to go,” says Chand.
“For Fiji, we have been expecting an education commission to address some of these issues. But instead, we see ‘talk shops’ like summits taking over, with ‘more of the same’ emerging, albeit in different packaging.”
Chand says finding new approaches to developing the education sector is essential because of the impact of external factors such as labour mobility schemes extending to the unskilled sector such as agriculture, caregiving, and cleaning services.
“The fact that now, relatively ‘unskilled’ people can go to work in Australia and New Zealand creates a huge impact on the mindset of students. Where earlier, a motivation for hard work and studies would have been to work in [these countries], now the power of that motivation is diminished significantly. This will have a serious impact on the education sector in Fiji and the Pacific. Unless governments take firm action, I foresee a steady decline in quality,” says Chand.
