The purpose of this paper is to document and discuss the 1981 reforms in teacher education in Jamaica. These important reforms have not yet been documented elsewhere and will no doubt be the subject of future research and debate within the education community. This paper:
 

Two theoretical conceptions of how to effect enhanced teacher performance, namely the technocratic and the teacher development models, have tended to dominate the literature of the past decade or so (McNergney and Carrier 1981).

The early years of this century were of considerable significance in elementary education in Jamaica. The stringent measures recommended by the Education Commission of 1897-98 to reduce expenditure on education were implemented, following the severe economic depression of the 1890s. For providers of education the religious denominations and the government this was a period of soul searching and decision making. Drastically reduced budgets meant identifying and defining priorities.

A university training programme was developed as part of a project to improve the standard of primary level numeracy in Trinidad and Tobago. Fifty-eight primary level teachers completed training to conduct workshops and provide field supervision in developmental and remedial mathematics. The programme of work, including activities and assessment techniques, is presented. The evaluation of both the university programme and the workshop training provides a background for reviewing the project's current status.

Reading comprehension, that is, functional literacy, was tested among a sample of 3,269 grade 6 students in Jamaican primary and all-age schools. The percentages of functional literacy varied greatly, as did the statistically significant differences in mean scores across school types, geographical locations, and sexes. In addition, performance in paragraph comprehension was more adversely affected by the levels of thinking the questions required than by the difficulty level of the paragraphs. The findings carry important implications for reading instruction.

Throughout the history of Caribbean education there has been a struggle to initiate and maintain science in the school curriculum. At first, science education was conceived as strictly utilitarian, necessary for producing people in the trades. That same stance however made it more difficult for science education to gain its rightful place in the training of the young. Some change has occurred in the past 20 years or so, but to many science educators these have done very little to enhance science in the curriculum.

This assessment of primary education in the Caribbean at the end of the 1980s considers how many, and which, children actually receive this type of education, the kind and quality of the education provided and received, and its cost. Further, the effectiveness of the educational provision is measured, and the constraints and challenges ahead are described.

I accept with pleasure and some amount of humility the invitation to write a short introduction to the special issue of the Caribbean Journal of Education devoted to primary education in honour of the Reginald N. Murray’s contribution to that sector of schooling. I worked with him for more than two decades in administration, and then in academics at the university of the West Indies, Mona, and the Caribbean Education Council, and generally in the wider world of education.

Caribbean Journal of Education (CJE) first appeared in 1974, 26 years after the establishment of The University College of the West Indies (UCWJ) in 1948. The University became The University of the West Indies (UWJ) in 1962; and CJE has emerged as the official journal for educational research in the Caribbean. This account of the journal serves to place it in the context of the evolution of the University's Departments of Education over the years. The index which follows this brief history is the main purpose of the undertaking. It covers the period 1983-1999.

The current wave of educational reform in Trinidad and Tobago follows the pattern in the West, at least in its rhetoric. Excellence, total quality management, quality assurance, school improvement, are buzz phrases associated with the larger concept of national unity and total quality nation. This paper argues that achieving the educational utopias and panaceas implied by these value laden terms demands a real­istic appraisal of the education system, and more specifically teacher education. The Education Policy Paper: 1993-2003 (Ministry of Education 1993), is used as the source document.