A majority of Jamaicans say the Holness Administration is only doing a fair job in its handling of the education sector.

That’s according to the numbers in the latest Nationwide/Bluedot Polls powered by Total Tools.

There are more people who think the administration is doing a bad job, than the number who think they are doing a good job on education.

More in this report from George Davis.

Andrew Holness and his cabinet have thrown billions of dollars at the problems in education since they first got the keys to Jamaica House in February 2016.

But according to the Opposition Leader, Mark Golding, Holness and his team are still not treating education with the priority it deserves.

The Bluedot researchers put this question to people across all 63 constituencies between February 22 and March 7; how would you rate the performance of the government as it relates to education?

A rating of one means doing a very poor job while a rating of five means doing a very good job.

16.6% of respondents say the government is doing a very poor job.

19.67% say they are doing a poor job.

At the other end of the scale, 15.48% say the Holness administration is doing a good job while only 5.82% rate them as doing a very good job.

The largest chunk of the respondents, 42.43%, say the government is doing only a fair job. That means neither good or bad.

Considering its spend on education over the last three budget cycles, the poll findings should trouble the Prime Minister, a former Education Minister, as he prepares to reason with the nation in his budget presentation in about two hours from now.

In the 2021-22 fiscal year, the government earmarked 114 billion dollars for the sector.

In 2022-23 the earmark was 123.7 billion dollars.

And for the new fiscal year, 23-24, the earmark is 143 billion, representing 22% of non debt recurrent expenditure.

In fact, education, in the new fiscal year, will receive the largest share of the new Budget for recurrent programmes, outside of debt payments and compensation of employees.

They say men lie, women lie. But numbers don’t.

But these numbers aren’t telling the truth the government expected to hear.

And the fact is that Jamaicans are seeing on paper the sums set down for education.

But they are not seeing the equivalent value.

And that has to be a problem for Andrew Michael Holness and his team.