The Education Ministry has circulated a plan to schools impacted by recent flooding, outlining strategies to recover lost learning and teaching time without extending the school term.

Permanent Secretary Selina Kuruleca signed the circular this morning, emphasizing that their priority is to ensure students’ education continues without disruption.

She stresses they will not cut into the school term holidays.

“What we have done is laid out for our teachers things that they can do either do it during school week and you can use Saturday but make sure we have consent from our parents for the extra time or go another half an hour extra in the afternoon or in the case you use the normal school day, you cut short your lunch break, you cut short your recess. So that’s three interventions and then of course the other things is making sure whatever time we have instead of focusing on the theory do as much activity based learning.”

Kuruleca also emphasizes that the Ministry is not dictating specific actions to teachers.

“We will not dictate to our teachers what they need to do. We just using that as a guide. We are not going to use the two weeks school holidays, I think people were alluding to that. No we are not go into your two weeks schools holidays. We were just calculating how many lost hours of learning and teaching , from 24 hours to approximately 32 hours thus far , they spent about seven hours in school of which the actual learning and teaching is about six hours.”

Schools in Viti Levu which remained closed today due to flooding will resume normal classes next Monday.