The Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture has joined forces with Jolly Futures to strengthen the foundational learning skills in early childhood education.

The aim is to close the education resource gap and enable investments in effective learning through Jolly Phonics training.

Jolly Phonics is a systematic, sequential phonics programme that is designed to teach children to read and write.

It teaches the letter sounds in an enjoyable, fun way and enables children to use them to read and write words.

The Deputy Executive Director of Education, Edda Bohn, highlighted the key objectives of the training.

"To ensure recovery and accelerate learning, we will work immediately to enroll all children and keep them in school, particularly marginalised girls; increase access to remedial and catch-up learning and teach children at their current learning levels; support teachers, giving them the tools that they need; and support the health, nutrition, and psycho-social well-being of every teacher and child."

Bohn also shed light on the training that was held in the year 2022, where 2,665 Grade 1 teachers were trained in Jolly Phonics across the 14 regions.

"56 Junior Primary (JP) Senior Education Officers were sensitised to Jolly Phonics, Jolly Grammar, and the Jolly Monitor App. Moreover, the National Development Plan (NDP) 5 also demands that a solid foundation be established in the formative years in view of developing the core skills in literacy by the year 2025. So, we are challenged to ensure that this target is achieved by the end of next year, as initially anticipated."

The senior education officer at the education head office, Eino Haifidi, empathised that he observed a great improvement in the primary sector across the country, hence the implementation of the training programme.
The programme further aims to train 3,123 educators countrywide.