Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) President Mark Malabver says the failure to adequately invest in early childhood education is now forcing the country to spend heavily to correct the social and academic problems it has caused, while negatively impacting national development.

“We are attempting to remediate on the back end what should have been properly developed on the front end,” said  Malabver, while addressing the seventh staging of the Early Childhood Professional Development Institute Professional Development Conference at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James, on Monday.

He further argued that if the country continues to underfund one of the most critical stages of education, it will negatively impact literacy, behaviour, emotional development, and long-term learning outcomes.“It costs far more to fix broken men and women than if you had intervened at the early childhood stage and done what we were always supposed to have been doing,” he said.Speaking to the theme, ‘Making Rights Real: Reclaiming General Comment Seven’, Malabver said Jamaica has historically failed to prioritise early childhood education since Independence, even though the sector lays the foundation for a child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development.