Samoa's Ministry for Education is planning to make early childhood education, or ECE, compulsory saying that it will be of both academic and social benefit.
That follows a nation-wide survey last year that found only 30 percent of children from three to five years of age are enrolled in ECE.
The ministry plans to increase that figure to over 50 percent in the next 10 years by gradually introducing compulsory ECE.
The chief executive of the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture, Karoline Afamasaga Fuata'i, told Amelia Langford that the benefits will be far-ranging.
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Transcript
KAROLINE AFAMASAGA FUATA'I: The reason we are committed to pursuing having children in ECE and pre-school is so that we can try and address the children's development early. As by the age of three years, developmentally, is very active and important. And if we set things right, educationally wise, we should be able to see children go through primary and secondary achieving much better than the results we have been seeing over the years especially in the areas of literacy and numeracy.
AMELIA LANGFORD: So there are a lot of benefits for children if they go through early childhood education?
KAF: That's correct. And we have also read international literature on this. We have been to workshops and conferences... and other countries have presented on the 'ratio of return'...in terms of the positive development of children that have been through pre-school compared to those who have not.
AL: And so, when does this begin? When does this become compulsory?
KAF: Compulsory is what we would like but we are also being very realistic. We need to work with the communities and the parents to make sure that eventually over a period of 10 to 20 years we will make it compulsory and so we are in the process of revising our Education Act and part of that work is to incorporate the mandate that we have been given by government to have ECE under the manifest under the Ministry of Education and so it has not been formalised yet but when it is, it will be in our Education Act.
AL: Okay, so you're working on the policy at the moment and it's going to be sort of a staggered approach, introduced gradually?
KAF: That's the idea because that's more realistic than expecting compulsory education overnight.
AL: How many schools will you need to achieve this goal?
KAF: We have about 112 centres in Samoa, registered, but we have 300 villages so the extent of the expansion that we need to do is huge.
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