Good morning and welcome to our celebration of International Literacy Day for 2024. We are really excited about today’s events and thrilled to have all of you here celebrate with us. A special thanks goes to the students and teachers who are joining us this morning, as they are the reason we do what we do, working together to ensure that education ministries, schools, teachers and students are supported in their efforts to achieve high quality education for all Pacific Island learners. Those efforts are all underpinned by literacy.
I also acknowledge and thank our Chief Guest, Mrs Ana Raivoce, for joining us today. Mrs Raivoce was retiring as director of EQAP when I joined the Pacific Community and took on that role in April 2015. She has been a longtime champion of education in the Pacific, spending many years with the South Pacific Board for Educational Assessment (which became EQAP), and most recently as an education consultant working with various ministries of education in the region. She was also the driving force behind the South Pacific Form Seven Certificate programme as it grew and developed in its early days, and I am very glad she is able to join us to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the SPFSC today.
You will hear from several speakers this morning after which there will be an opportunity to participate in various activities around the room and have some cake to celebrate the day with us. But before we get to all of that, let me say a few words about International Literacy Day.
International Literacy Day was first declared by UNESCO 58 years ago, and first celebrated 57 years ago on the 8th of September 1967. Since then, International Literacy Day has been marked worldwide on the 8th of September each year, which is Sunday this year so that is why we chose to have our celebrations today. The day was declared to remind us of the importance of literacy in our local communities as well as at the global level and for that reason, we have taken a regional approach to localising the theme of the international day from “Promoting multilingual education: Literacy for mutual understanding and peace” to “Enhancing literacy through multilingualism: Promoting peace across the Blue Pacific Continent”.
EQAP has been busy supporting literacy efforts in the region in the year since we last celebrated International Literacy Day. We worked with teachers to produce 65 episodes of PILNA TV. PILNA TV episodes are short videos that help teachers and parents support their children in improving their reading skills through vocabulary and comprehension strategies.
We worked with ministries of education to develop and today to launch a regional education research bank. The Education Research Bank responds to the region’s information management challenges. The bank serves as an open-source platform allowing for the sharing of knowledge from the Pacific, by the Pacific and for the Pacific that helps make Pacific education research more accessible to those who need it.
After the regional poetry contest that was launched last year during our International Literacy Day celebrations, our team collaborated with the competition entrants to develop a poetry booklet featuring 20 of the poems from the competition along with notes and activities to support teachers in teaching reading using poetry at all levels.
During the past year EQAP added additional literacy expertise to our team which will help us better support the region in efforts to improve literacy. We have been supporting ministries of education with Synthetic Phonics instruction and some of the students and teachers here today have been using that approach in their reading classes.
As I said at the start of my remarks, literacy underpins high quality education and literacy goes well beyond simply reading words on a page. Over the past year the EQAP team worked with ministries around the region and with several schools across five countries to develop the Pacific Assessment for Lower Secondary which measures reading and writing along with science literacy and through the content, ocean and climate literacy as well.
Every three years, we measure literacy proficiency at year 4 and year 6 with the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment, or PILNA. In 2025 we will carry out the 5th administration of PILNA across 15 countries and in 10 languages. We look forward to the results which we expect will show the impact of the many efforts ongoing around the Pacific to address literacy concerns.
I hope that everyone finds something to interest them here today in our celebration activities and that you all enjoy the morning’s events. In closing, I wish all of you a very happy International Literacy Day.
