After Minister of Education Priya Manickchand spoke at the National Grade Six Assessment booster programme last Friday, her words were seized upon by a number of people in the belief that the exam was about to be abolished. It was a misinterpretation. What she actually said was: “NGSA is something we have to sit, we have to write, not because we want to test children and find out who is bright and who is not … it’s a placement exam where we have to find out where to put children. After primary school, which high school are you going to? It has turned into something that I don’t like any more … never really did.”
She went on to clarify what she had really intended: “I didn’t say we were doing away with NGSA … I said we hope to get to a place where it doesn’t matter which secondary school you get, you are going to be able to do well and perform well.” She expanded on this with the remark, “In this government I am letting you know we are close rather than further from the place of saying to you, ‘it doesn’t matter which high school you get, you can do well and you can perform well.’”
Just how close the government is in reality to making all secondary schools equal is a moot point, presuming that it will ever be fully achievable. It is true that there has been an impressive increase in the number of secondary schools, but the public has never been told precisely how many primary tops are still in existence or even community high schools. Furthermore, the education sector has been suffering from a teaching deficit in terms of qualified teachers, particularly graduates who should be staffing the secondary schools. The various on-the-job teaching programmes which are instituted periodically while helpful, are no substitute for teachers with a sound basic education and a degree. At the secondary level content is important, and not just methods.
The Minister was, of course, being a little disingenuous when she described the assessment as not designed to find out how bright a pupil was, but rather a mechanism for placement. At the moment it is a kind of partial placement examination, which assigns children to the better resourced as well as the senior secondary schools based on their test scores. The assumption is that for the most part (although this is certainly not an absolute truth) the brighter an examinee is, the better his or her score will be.
It was not altogether apparent from Ms Manickchand’s words whether the intention is to scrap the NGSA entirely once all secondary schools are on a par, or whether the exam would be retained, but that parents could be reassured that it really wouldn’t matter which school their child attended, because they could still become a “top performing” student. She was also reported as saying that the government was exploring how “to deliver education equally” and went on to give the assurance that, “We’re going to work very hard to make all secondary schools equal.”
The NGSA replaced the SSEE a few years ago, and was originally contemplated as the third of three assessments in the primary school to establish what progress, if any, children were making. The plan was to eliminate it entirely once there was parity in secondary schools, but since there were insufficient secondary schools in any case to cater for all those leaving primary, the assessment was used to place the best performing students in the better-endowed secondaries. As such, far from being an assessment, it effectively remained the SSEE under a new name. The content of the assessment and its format, for instance, were identical to those of its predecessor. The long-term aim was to have school attendance based on a catchment area principle.
The Minister described herself as “inspired” by students who are not from top schools, but who have performed outstandingly. In addition, she alluded to the tradition of Queen’s College, which cannot be replaced. (The school was founded in 1844.) What can be replaced she said, was the service, quality and resources in other schools to equalise performance across Guyana. While it is perfectly true that other, younger schools can produce high achievers, more particularly if they build up some level of esprit de corps, schools with a long pedigree like Bishops’ and others will still be seen as premier institutions in the eyes of the public. Burnham inaugurated the building of President’s College with a view to it displacing Queen’s, but while it has produced some impressive scholars it has never superseded the latter.
Even if, for the sake of argument, the NGSA were to be done away with, and primary school leavers and a catchment area principle were to be invoked for secondary placement, there are probably quite a number of parents who would still want their children to go to Queen’s, no matter how ‘equal’ in terms of resources many other schools were. Apart from the fact that the more ‘desirable’ institutions are longer established, and several of them have acquired a certain aura as a consequence, they will also be among those which have a sixth form, and the CAPE exams require the best qualified teachers.
The lesson from England with regard to the catchment area principle is perhaps instructive. In areas where schools have a good reputation, parents who can afford it try to buy houses in the neighbourhood, driving up property prices in the process. While that possibly might not happen in this country, the temptation for corrupt practices in terms of placement might be great.
If the plan is not to extinguish the NGSA even after the government feels that equalisation has been achieved, the authorities might defend it on the basis that an exam for the most prestigious schools, at least, has a certain (although not total) objectivity about it. The real problem lies in the fact that the NGSA has spawned all kinds of aberrations, not the least of which is the pernicious extra lessons syndrome.
All of this is not to say that the Minister is not right to pursue the goal of equality in secondary schools, it is just that it is necessary to have the same objective in primary schools as well. This is particularly so if a catchment area principle is what the Ministry has in mind. After all, it is the primary schools which feed the secondary ones, and the chances of a child emerging from a deficient primary establishment will be automatically reduced at the secondary level. Education is a cumulative process, and what happens at the primary stage is critical to later success.
