In a well written and most courageous article in the Daily Post of Saturday, 4 April, Mr Howard Aru detailed the deep seated problems within the MoET that are undermining education.
In Vanuatu, education is a rolling disaster akin to an annual Cyclone Pam with consequences far in excess of any natural event. The National Human Resource Development Plan, fully dependent upon a functioning education sector, has been reduced to an expensive fantasy with zero chance of achievement. Just one more wasted exercise in third world dreaming. Here are some shocking specifics.
Eighty Percent Illiterate. Only twenty percent of those who start Kindergarten manage to graduate from Year 10. The rest, eight out of every ten students, drop out or fail and most are functionally illiterate.
It is now common for Year 6 students transferring in from government schools to be unable to read. We have employed additional staff to work with these students to try and improve their literacy standard.
A Decade of Failure. For more than a decade the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) has highlighted the issues. Every three years the assembled knowledgeable and qualified staff of MoET listen to the results like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, they shake their heads, mutter about how hard life is and then move on. Nothing changes!
The Government’s own Vanuatu Standardised Test of Achievement (VANSTA) has confirmed the continuing deterioration with similar response. In 2021, the last year for which results have been published, more than 55% of Year 4 students nationwide failed to reach the minimum standard in literacy. In Torba and Tafea the failure rate was around 75%.
The results of both PILNA and VANSTA conducted in 2025, after many months of the teachers’ strike, will be shocking but will quite likely never be published. Publishing the results could produce too much demand for change.
Financial Mismanagement. Whether it is payment of teachers, distribution of subsidies, or allocation of grants the criteria are arbitrary, there is no documentation and even less accountability. The ‘system’ has so few checks and balances that money can be directed anywhere and often is. When the ‘misallocations’ are reported the response from MoET staff is denial and obstruction. Why should errors need to be corrected? And yes, we have the documented evidence!
Massive Waste. Vanuatu spends hundreds of millions of vatu on education, more than a quarter of its national budget and more per capita than any other nation in the Pacific. Aid agencies and NGO’s throw many more millions into what is a deep dark hole for almost no result. How can a nation with limited resources justify spending so much to achieve so little? Despite this expenditure there are students who sit on the ground with no desks or chairs, they swelter under tents with no books or pens, they are herded into classes of fifty, sixty and even more. Teachers write from the only textbook onto blackboards, students copy as best they can from the blackboard to whatever paper they have and thus endeth the lesson. Yes, it is that bad!
Consequences for All. The standard of literacy is so low now that tertiary institutions are being forced to introduce ‘bridging courses’ to try and boost the capacity of school leavers to where they can actually participate effectively in further education. Businesses should be mounting strident demands for change. It seems there is an acceptance that the solution is to import qualified staff from overseas while Ni Vanuatu are consigned to pick fruit or staff resorts in Australia and New Zealand. The effort required to train and develop school leavers who cannot read and write is just too costly.
The Private Sector Contrast. While MoET likes to blame parents, students, the culture, smart phones and almost anything else for the collapse in literacy, there is a stark contrast being demonstrated by private schools. In 2025 every student in our school that sat the Year 10 national examinations, passed. This included a deaf student and other students with disabilities that had prevented them acquiring an education in government schools. It is of overwhelming joy to us to see students who receive absolutely no assistance from government outperforming students in the government schools that could not accommodate them. It is, however, a shocking indictment of an education system where some schools have every student fail and yet face no consequences and experience no intervention.
Staff within MoET and government teachers obviously recognise the difference in standards as many of them send their children to private schools. Unable to change the system within which they work they choose the better option.
Causes Well Known. Howard Aru highlighted the shocking culture of incompetence and failure within MoET that is well known to anyone who has dealt with the Ministry. In our experience providing assistance to schools from Santo to Tanna the Principals and teachers are poorly trained, totally unresourced, demotivated, but desperately keen to learn. We are continually amazed at how much can be achieved with so little in what is a testimony to the resilience and optimism of Vanuatu and its people. Effective practical training, personal encouragement, some simple resources and the transformation is astounding. Actually pay a visit to a school, observe a lesson, sit and talk to the teachers, offer suggestions and provide assistance and the responses are truly humbling.
The system is full of directors, managers, officers and coordinators, all on significant salaries and all armed with a bagful of excuses as to why they hardly ever visit any schools. They can all tell teachers what should be done but very few can actually demonstrate it.
What ‘training’ is provided is theoretical, not practical, starts at the top and doesn’t trickle far down the ranks, there is no reward for achievement and no accountability for failure. There is just an endless round of strategies, road maps, programs, policies and procedures, thinktanks and talkfests while nothing really changes.
Vanuatu’s teachers are not the problem, the bureaucratic system has simply failed them.
The learned and qualified within MoET are focussed on the next planning session, workshop, seminar or conference or the next opportunity to gain a degree, masters or PhD at government expense. That, not achievement, is what increases the salary and the opportunity for travel.
Is Reform Possible? Howard Aru highlighted the desperate need for reform. But is there the necessary will? True reform requires a transformation of attitudes. In the private sector if you need to reform an organisation then you change the personnel, starting from the top. Those who created the problem will work tirelessly to protect their legacy. They will smile, nod, and wait and slowly destroy with lethargy all attempts to improve. Eventually those demanding change wear out and move on, nothing achieved.
But who in Vanuatu has the courage to implement true reform by changing the key personnel?
Tony Batten
Business Manager
