I want to especially greet the president of the Republic, Mr. Juan Manuel Santos; the first lady, Mrs. María Clemencia de Santos; all my partners in the government team; the representatives of the legislative and judicial branches of the government; the president of the Chamber of Representatives; the governors and mayors present here today; the professional and union leaders, as well as leaders from society organizations; the ambassadors and representatives of multilateral organisms; and, of course, a special greeting to the principals of higher education institutions, managing teachers, teachers, students, parents, the Ministry team and all guests that have accepted today's invitation. I also want to say hello to the institutions and people that are online with us and all Colombians watching this broadcast on TV.
As the President of the Republic mentioned it, the education is the path to prosperity and is the most powerful vehicle to reduce poverty and inequity gaps. For this reason, the education policy for the next four years has been built in order to close those gaps starting from the important goals achieved in the last eight years and, certainly, by following the guidelines provided by the President of the Republic in his government program which, in turn, must be included in the making of the development plan for the next four years. What are the goals accomplished on which the policy will be built? As the president himself said: extraordinary achievements in terms of coverage, connectivity improvement, creation of a quality measuring system and modernization of the sector.
The gaps are evident; when we look at our country we see a country of regions and realize about the large gaps in terms of quality, retention, defection, quality between private and public and, of course, in terms of access and permanence. Then, to be able to close these gaps, we have defined our education policy as 'Quality Education'
which, as President Santos says, is the government's great bet: we will improve the education quality in this country. It is a hard, difficult task and it takes time, but this is the purpose to which we will be committed and to accomplish that we need you all.
Then the policy focuses on five main points:
In the first place, improve the level of education at all levels; and that is a very important thing. The aspects of the policy are totally transversal since each one of those goes from the first infancy, goes through basic and middle school and then continues to higher education. This is the way in which the policy has been conceived and in such way it will be reflected in our development plan. Therefore, we will improve quality, increase coverage and improve the holistic service for the first infancy; we will close gaps, incorporate innovation and new technologies, improve the sense of belonging in education and, most importantly, to achieve this great objectives we need to improve management in the education sector. Next, I will present to you each one of these focuses of the policy and how we will do it as well as what strategies we will take into consideration.
We will therefore try to improve the quality of education and to do that we have to improve basic competences, as the president said, in language, math, science and so forth; and also the citizens' competences that allow us to become better human beings, which is mainly the policy's main focus. And definitely, we must improve all quality assurance systems at each one of the levels of the Colombian education sector.
Which is the goal we will impose ourselves? The first and very important thing is that the next time that tests are performed, which will be the Pruebas Saber (knowledge tests) for fifth grade in 2012, at least 25% of the kids that take these census tests must substantially improve quality.
Secondly, to achieve this goal we will accompany 100% of the education institutions that according to our records score low in terms of achievements; there are 1,800 education institutions throughout Colombia, out of a total of 13,800. Having said this, we will commit ourselves from the Ministry, along with our education departments, to accompanying, through a wholesome and tailor-made offer, each one of these education institutions scoring low achievement for them to make their improvement plan and we will be there through its development.
Reduce illiteracy will be another priority of the government and would expect to reduce it in one point; in an eight-year period it has been reduced in one point and in the next four years we will make an extraordinary effort to take it to a 5.7% as an indicator.
Another one of the very important goals that we will propose is that all programs within the technical and technological education system, as the president said, must be relevant, of good quality and must have a qualified record. Today, technical and technological institutions have it, but we still have to improve Sena, which has already started the process to obtain the qualified record for all programs, both technical and technological, it offers. The Sena is an extraordinary player, fundamental and vital for our country, and we need to guarantee that this technical and technological education be of the most outstanding quality.
And last but not least, there is the non-formal education, which means programs of preparation for work; there are more than 1,100,000 Colombians taking these courses and for this important sector a defined quality system does not exist; for this reason we will have to create the Assurance System for all of these programs so that at the end of these four years we will have all of those programs with the qualified record requirement. Today, we have more than 9,700 different programs. Why is the qualified record requirement important? What the Ministry of education does is to verify that all of these programs and institutions comply with the conditions required to guarantee quality education.
How are we going to do this in terms of strategy? We are going to reinforce the development of competences, consolidate the evaluation system at all levels. Nowadays children and youngsters in fifth, ninth and 11th grades are evaluated; university students are evaluated by means of the ECAES tests, both institutions and programs are assessed, but not all levels have a quality assurance system. Then, what shall we commit to? We are going to create a quality assurance system to serve the first infancy so that we can guarantee that the providers of this service deliver a product of excellent quality. We will also create the certification system for the preschool, basic and middle education institutions; in terms of education for work, we will continue to consolidate the system that is already working fine. Therefore, this will be an important advance to guarantee the quality of education offered in the country in each one of the sectors of the education level.
Likewise, as one of the most important goals of this government we will develop the Great National Teachers Training Plan. All international studies show that the quality of the education system in the country should not be higher than the quality of its teachers. For this reason, if we want to improve the quality in our country, we must carry out a very strong, mass program, customized to fit the different teachers and managing teachers in our country. We have the information, the assessment of the results of their evaluations and we know where the gaps are. Having said this, with the support of Sena and the higher education institutions both in person or online, we will spread those training programs to all teachers throughout the country.
One more challenge that we face is how to make our children use their free time in a productive fashion; when the child finishes school everyday, he or she does not have much or nothing to do, so we will work to expand their study day or create complementary sessions. How will we do it? By means of strengthening relations with regional entities, family benefit funds, Coldeportes and NGOs, which will be able to offer these children a productive and useful way to use their free time after school.
And finally, as I was saying, we will not only carry out strong accompanying to the low-scoring institutions but also to those children with low achievement scores.
Regarding the first infancy, as the president said, we have a very ambitious goal and is to double coverage for the poorest children in our country; levels 1, 2 and 3 of the Sisben health system and the most vulnerable population in order to reach one million children with full health, nutrition and psychological accompanying services. To do that, we will have to implement what the president decided and is this new cross institutional model to get to the children in their first infancy with a very well articulated offer.
From the Ministry we will have to build pedagogic guidelines for this initial education; we will also build adequate learning environments for this population. And last but not least, we have to develop a very strong mass program to train and qualify all education agents that today serve the first infancy population.
The third great objective that we have imposed ourselves, as the president said, is to close the gap starting from the regions; these are coverage gaps, defection and retention. The previous government created 1,300,000 places, an extraordinary and very successful effort, but we still have one more million children outside the system with one aggravating factor: 70% of the children are located in the rural sector and they happen to be the poorest.
What is our commitment? We will create 600,000 new places; we'll find those children and to do so the Red Juntos (the Together Network) plays an important role in achieving this goal, key to the development of the country. We will work in order to reduce defection at preschool, basic and middle levels and also, as the president said, we will augment the number of places and we will additionally create about 500,000 places in the higher education level.
Along with the creation of these new places we have to work to reduce the extremely high level of defection. How will we do it? First, we have to work to redefine the regional entities typology to see, taking their being in rural areas into consideration, how we will offer resources to cover those children; we have to better focus our actions to improve retention by means of nutrition and transportation for children of lower income families.
Also, to reduce defection at higher education institutions, the President of the Republic will summon the school principals of the country, from all higher education institutions, to make a great pact in the fight against defection. With the support of the Ministry of National Education, we will ask each and one of the principals to reinforce their support and tutoring programs and to improve their programs within their institutions because, according to studies performed by the Ministry of Education, children leave the system for two reasons: first, because they do not have the necessary competences to remain at the University and their academic performance is too low; and second, for economic reasons. Then, the president will summon the principals to make a deal and continue to work with the support of the Ministry.
Of course, we have to work to increase the offer of the private and public university, and to do this we are studying a wholesome reform to Law 30. Also, resources for Icetex should be increased and different alternatives are being looked at.
Innovation and relevance are absolutely vital for quality education that serves the needs of the productive and rural sectors in a globalized world. Which are the goals we are going to impose ourselves? We will generate virtual content as part of the pedagogic model in the curricula so that all teachers train themselves to be able to teach that material. For this reason, we commit ourselves to generating content and training those teachers. We will train 50% of such teachers, which means 160,000 individuals, at the end of this four-year term, for them to have digital competence certifications, which is essential to be able to incorporate technologies in the Colombian education system.
Our goal at the end of these four years is also to have 25% of these children reach bilingualism; as the president said, we have to check this goal to see how we can commit ourselves to something more ambitious; this revision will be made inside the Ministry.
How are we going to do it? How are we going to incorporate innovation and new technologies in the education system? To comply with this we will create a great national education innovation system; we will create five regional centers in the country, which will help to reduce gaps; at these regional centers, along with the support of the higher education entities, we will generate innovation and knowledge by using new technologies.
Strong mass programs will be developed in terms of teacher training but, mostly, high-quality virtual content to increase coverage and deliver more quality and relevant education will be generated. Who will be our partner and ally in this great project to be developed in the country? The Korean government; at present, we have resources for 36 million dollars and we are defining, from within the Ministry, how we are going to invest those resources. I would like to tell you that Korea has one of the best education quality levels and that two years ago was recognized by the UNESCO as the country that has most successfully incorporated new technologies in the education sector, so they will be our allies and partners who will help us accomplish these ambitious goals which, no doubt, will highly impact the quality of the education sector.
We will have to continue to strengthen the articulation of both basic and middle education with the higher education sector and we will also reinforce research and innovation with the help of Colciencias. We are also willing to reinforce our labor observatory, which is of most importance for decision-making because it allows us to see the level of relevance and labor eligibility of our youngsters as soon as they leave their higher education. Of course, we will work to internationalize education at all levels so that there is more mobility for students and teachers as well as curricula, programs and diploma recognition; and most certainly we will also have to develop a very strong program for training teachers in the command of English language. This is, in turn, one of the biggest problems of the country that prevents it from faster advancing towards bilingualism: we do not have teachers able to speak English and therefore we do not have teachers that can teach children to speak a second language. There we have a very important challenge and a large program to develop.
To be able to accomplish these goals, management of the sector must improve. Our goal is to adopt the public management model, not only at the national level but also at the international one. To do that, it is indispensable that the 94 education departments in charge of administering education from the regions have their vital processes totally certified. For the last few years it has been possible to cover half of those education departments and we intend that in 2012, all the education departments have their processes certified. To accomplish that we have to promote the good government principles, which have been the guidelines provided by the President of the Republic throughout the Colombian education system. We must improve our control and follow up systems to public resources as well as the mechanisms for inspection, vigilance and control.
All these great goals will only be possible to accomplish, as the president of the Republic said, if all of you and society as a whole commit themselves to this great national agreement, an agreement for quality. And quality has to be a national commitment. The plan that I have presented to you will be discussed throughout the regions when we come forward with our sector plan; we will go to different regions to talk and discuss the strategies as well as the action plans so that we can be much more assertive and accurate at implementing policy. If we want to close gaps in the regions, of course we have to ask those regions and this is our commitment from the national government.
To finish my speech I would like to thank you all for your participation in the event and let you know and insist that we need you all. The president and I will be in charge of summoning you and the different sectors permanently to carry out a follow up to the advances in the goals and compromises, but mostly to invite you to join in a proactive manner, from the standpoint of your own competences, the development of this plan that seeks to improve the quality of education in this country.
Thank you very much.
