Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand on Friday hailed the two days of the National Grade Six Assessment as a success and said that results should be available by July 5th.
“We just concluded a massively successful two days in the country from the Ministry of Education’s perspective”, she said in a Facebook video.
She conveyed that there was a 95% attendance of those registered for the exams across the country with a 3% absentee rate. She mentioned however that this is not “too high”.
“What … I mean by that is if there is a child going to St Pius and (who) left St Pius without telling us but went to School of the Nations or Mae’s, a private school and registered there and did the exams there they would be treated there as walk-in but at St Pius as an absentee”, she said.
The Minister also noted that 2024 has witnessed the most notable turnout for examinations since the COVID-19 pandemic, with fewer children absent. However, she said that while COVID-19 is no longer a prevalent reason for absence, the Ministry of Education continues to grapple with the aftermath of a system that was disrupted by the outbreak. “I am very, very glad to see that we are retaining more children in the system”, she said.
Manickchand added that the marking process has commenced with the responsibility for grading papers resting with the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC).
She noted that CXC managed the entire process where they had invigilators who delivered the papers and who returned those back to CXC. Batching and processing has begun.
“Papers go outside of the country, sometimes Barbados, sometimes Trinidad to get marked and some are marked here locally”, she related. Paper one is marked overseas while Paper 2 is marked by markers that CXC hires.
The examination results release date is expected to be “on or before” July 5th 2024 and results will be available online.
Manickchand praised the national school feeding programme for its commitment during the two days of the examinations. “We delivered over 49,500 meals between the course of Thursday and Friday to our children, breakfast, lunch or hot meals to the hinterland and across the country”.
She did however acknowledge that complaints were unavoidable since the system was dealing with over 15,000 children countrywide.
“We were dealing with over 15,000 kids and a large number of caterers which were really small businesswomen mostly and more than 500 locations. You will have some hiccups here and there but overall we are very, very happy that the programme was successful”. She said that the ministry is currently reviewing the areas where problems had occurred to ensure that they never recur.
She shared her well wishes to the pupils who sat the exams and encouraged them to learn something new while they await their results.
