During an almost four-hour-long discussion of the poor performance in Mathematics recorded in this year’s National Grade Six Assessment, Cabinet members agreed that the situation was dire and a plan is needed to address it, Minister of State Joseph Harmon said on Friday.
The Ministry of the Presidency, in a statement issued on Wednesday, said Cabinet examined the “unsatisfactory” results as a matter of “extreme urgency and grave national importance” and had called on the Ministry of Education and its technical advisors to identify all appropriate steps needed to remedy this situation.
At a post-Cabinet news briefing on Friday, Harmon said the meeting was probably the first one “where every single member of Cabinet had a view and expressed that view very forcibly.”
When asked to highlight some of the main views, including his own, Harmon declined, while saying that Cabinet’s decisions are based on a collective not on individual perspectives and this is what is provided to the public. “Every member had a view but they all tended to say that this was a crisis which needed to be addressed and that the Ministry of Education must come up with a plan and so I would not go beyond that to tell you what were the individual views of members of the Cabinet,” he said.
Asked if any consideration is being given to the Education Bill, which was tabled several years ago, Harmon said that this was not discussed on Tuesday because Cabinet was focused on the results and how they can be dealt with now. “Certainly, in a wider context, when the Minister of Education comes to Cabinet with his plan that may very well be part of the overall architecture of the ministry that will be dealt with when the minister deals with the issue concerning the poor Mathematics performance,” he added.
The Ministry of the Presidency release on Wednesday noted that for many years Guyana has “consistently failed to achieve acceptable pass rates” and that the previous approach to this problem has been inadequate.
According to the release, this year the Ministry of Education contracted the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) to conduct the examination for the Grade Six students in Guyana. “The basis of assessment used by the Caribbean Examinations Council was radically different from what was used previously by the Ministry of Education. This year there was an increased focus on reasoning and a decreased emphasis on retention,” the release pointed out.
It was noted that the new method of testing exposed “even more the weakness of the previous approach to education adopted by the Ministry of Education….”
The release added that “Cabinet considers this situation one of national urgency requiring its focused attention and commitment to finding adequate and appropriate solutions in the shortest possible time.”
With regard to short and medium-term measures, it said they would include remedial training of teachers, better and more varied textbooks, more teaching aids and better use of technology in the delivery of education.
In June, shortly after the results were announced, Stabroek News had asked the then Chief Education Officer Olato Sam whether an analysis of the performance of all students would be made public but he said that was not the ministry’s intention.
“We are in the process of examining students’ performance in every area of the examination but those reports are for the schools since it is they who will have to put systems in place to correct these matters,” Sam had said.
The last time that an analysis of results was made public was in 2014.
