During the presentation of the 2017 Budget on Monday, Minister of Finance Winston Jordan revealed that of the 14,386 students who wrote the 2016 National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) only 14% or 2,014 students were able to achieve a passing grade in Mathematics and less than 50% achieved passes in English.
Jordan stressed that these results represent a crisis since “over 12,000 of our children were not numerate, while more than half of those writing English could not sufficiently comprehend our official language to attain a 50 percent score.”
This is first time the government has revealed the pass rate for these subject areas at the 2016 sitting of the examination. The last time the pass rate for Grade Six Mathematics was made public was in 2014 when 31.52% of the 15,227 candidates who sat the examinations that year achieved 50% or more in the subject area.