and focus on primary education.

Shadow Education Minister Ms Jennifer Smith stressed this yesterday at the PLP's daily Press conference leading up to the general election.

Releasing the party's platform on education, Ms Smith said: "The PLP would put its most strenuous efforts and finances into the early years of schooling.

"Research shows that what happens between the ages of four and nine sets the stage for a student's entire educational experience.'' Ms Smith added that the PLP did not think that such a foundation should depend on whether parents could afford to send their children to pre-school -- as is now the case.

Therefore, she said, a PLP Government would provide sufficient public pre-schools to ensure that all children received a head-start on education.

"Primary means fundamental,'' Ms Smith said. "Primary means first; primary means most important. That is why we're putting our focus there.'' Next to primary, a PLP Government would put emphasis on teachers, she added.

"We need to really give them the support they deserve,'' Ms Smith said. "If we would put teaching assistants in classes as the Education Planning Team recommended, it would go a long way to solving a number of problems with students.'' She said a PLP Government would also: Ensure that the Child Development Project be a full department working in conjunction with Education "so that there is a continuity of services in any special needs identified by them''; Ensure that all public schools had equal facilities in terms of physical plant, teaching and support staff, materials and services; and Provide programmes and opportunities for academic, emotional, creative physical and social worth and growth in high schools.

This, she explained, would help graduates cope with the complexities of life in the world outside of school.

"We don't think it is good enough to brag about 64 percent of our young people going abroad for higher training when you can't tell us where these 64 percent are gainfully employed in our society,'' Ms Smith added.

The PLP's plans could only be accomplished through a partnership of "concerned effort'' from teachers, students, parents and the community at large.

Noting that Government had yet to implement many aspects of public school reform recommended by the EPT in the 1980s, she said reform should have begun at the Education Ministry.

"We cannot have accountability at the bottom before having accountability at the top,'' she stressed.

OCTOBER 1993 ELECTION