Insightful commentaries have emerged out of the august house this week with the Assistant Minister of Education and Skills Development, Dr Unity Dow setting the tone on improving the quality of our education. While advocating [for] the lion’s share of the national budget, the learned assistant minister publicly made her unimpressed observation about the education system of our republic and called for immediate overhaul. She minced no words when she talked about the absence of a robust early childhood education that can prepare students for years of continuous learning and as a result, empowered products who can stand on their feet after completion of their studies.┬á This is great news!
The National Human Resource Development Strategy (NHRDS) recognises among other focal areas, the importance of early childhood learning as Dow articulates. Meanwhile, the Human Resource Development Council (HDRDC) is mandated to coordinate the implementation of the NHRDS in its entirety hence the subject matter has not only been of interest, but absolutely necessary and relevant to be thrust in the public space for more instructive deliberations. So many a times we have been told that education is an unending process, and that can mean from day one until the last day on earth. Human beings keep learning new things every stage of our lives. Embracing this truth, the NHRDS developed a model that I have likened to a pipeline carrying life-giving commodity that is rare in this desert country. Think of the North-South water carrier having leaks between Letsibogo Dam and our Gaborone Dam.
A leaking pipeline is what Dow is bemoaning in her contribution to parliament debates, when she decries the absence of early childhood education. The NHRDS model that provides an answer to the problem rightly observed by the assistant minister is called Life-long Learning Cycle. As the Acting Chief Executive of HRDC, Dr Patrick Molutsi is fond of reminding us, the lifelong learning model is best captured by the description: ‘from the cradle to the grave’. The NHRDS is saying that if Botswana was to meet her human resource challenges, people must be taught from an early age in a structured educational system that provides the right environment, quality-assured instructors and instruction materials for each stage of their learning to include the elderly and other populations who are hungry for expansion of knowledge. The life-long learning model is clear that pre-school is a fundamental building block for a vigorous educational system that supports the learner to exploit the tools of learning such as inter-personal relations at infancy stage.
To return to the analogy of the leaking pipeline that results in drought for the greater Gaborone area, it is obvious [that] Dow is saying that it is high time we attended to the leaks in our education system to make sure that all our children pass through every stage of learning to handle tertiary and vocational training later in their lives. For sure, if you train them well during the foundational stage, the chance is that they shall cope with challenges as they go along. Research elsewhere has borne results that those children who had the privilege to access early childhood learning are always a step ahead of their peers who entered the education system in standard one.
Those privileged parents whose children go to kindergarten bear witness to the more cognitive skills their toddlers have than those their ages, but who start in standard one. Of course as they go up the grades, exceptionally gifted children who entered in standard one can still outpace those with pre-school experience, but still a great majority of   children who had a strong foundational education rooted in pre-school curriculum make it through to tertiary level and beyond, while those without pre-school experience in their majority drop by the wayside at each end of the learning stage.
Common knowledge is that by end of February, the results of the Botswana General Certificate in Secondary Education (BGCSE) are published. It is also public secret that while every private secondary school offering a similar qualification hardly ever registers failures or ungraded among their candidates, our public schools always have those results in alarming numbers. Put short, it is probable (almost always) that those children from privileged families who were provided with pre-school education might have continued their basic education at a private school, and therefore never had to drop at any stage of their learning experience because of the strong educational foundation, or they may have joined the mainstream in public schools, but unlikely that they dropped along the way.
It should not be hard to imagine the tens of thousands of those who dropped at standard seven and tens of thousands at junior certificate level from our public schools. If you combine the totals of these three stages, you begin to see that this nation is sitting on a ticking time bomb because these children, if they cannot do anything about their lives due to lack of capacity to absorb them into the system of education, what do they turn into? Your guess is as good as mine and that is why Government must roll out as a matter of top priority, early childhood education to seal the leaking pipeline. 
Moreover, our children who start in standard one learn in an environment where the odds are probable to avoid or be defeated by them. Simply put, all private schools have designed their curriculum such that pre-school is at the heart of learning so much that a child whose age qualifies to start in standard one, would rather be delayed in pre-school for the absolute reason to equip him or her with the basic cognitive skills that make learning an enjoyable experience throughout the life of the child. Such a child whether continuing in the private or public education system has little chances of finding the learning experience unpleasant, hence the success rates of these private schools are always higher than our own public schools.
It is gratifying to hear the sentiments expressed by the assistant minister of education and skills development because she shall be instrumental in giving support for the work of the HRDC as we set out to push forth the agenda of making education accessible to the citizens from the ‘cradle to the grave’ in an endeavour to match the needs of our growing economy.
