As Belize pushes forward with sweeping nationwide changes to its education sector, policy and legislation have failed to keep pace with on-the-ground reforms — a gap the government is moving to close with new legislative proposals tabled by the Ministry of Education.
Alongside the separate ITVET Bill, Education Minister Francis Fonseca introduced the new Education Bill on July 31, 2026, which will fully repeal and replace the decades-old Education and Training Act if passed. The core mission of the new legislation is to bring Belize’s education legal framework into alignment with the suite of transformative reforms the ministry has rolled out across the country over the past five years.
Fonseca emphasized that the existing law has simply been outgrown by the rapid evolution of Belize’s education system. “Over the past five plus years, we have introduced a number of important new initiatives, policy reforms,” he explained. “We have for example initiated and launched the Education Upliftment Project, the free tuition project. Tuition is a component, but it is much broader than tuition.”
Beyond removing tuition barriers for students, the ministry has implemented several other major national programs: a nationwide school feeding program to support food-insecure students, the Connect Ed Program that has expanded wireless internet access to hundreds of public schools across the country, a new competency-based curriculum framework designed to better prepare students for workforce and higher education needs, updated educator licensing requirements, and a new national student assessment framework to measure learning outcomes more accurately.
None of these rolling reforms have been matched by updates to the country’s foundational education law, creating a mismatch between policy implementation and legal governance that the new bill aims to resolve. Fonseca noted that the proposal was developed over months of collaborative consultations with a wide range of education stakeholders, including school administrators, teacher unions, parent groups and non-governmental organizations, to ensure the final legislation addresses the real-world needs of the sector. The final text also preserves and strengthens the long-standing collaborative church-state partnership that has shaped Belizean education for generations, a key priority for stakeholders that has been retained through the consultation process.
This report is adapted from a transcript of an evening television news broadcast, with all speaker testimony retained in its original context. The full broadcast is available to view via the original publication’s digital platform.