The release of the results of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) customarily provides a shift in attention from the ‘hard grind’ of the academic year that transitions another batch of the nation’s children from primary to secondary schools’ level. The results provide a once-a-year interlude of exhalation for children and parents alike, mixed emotions ranging from unbridled euphoria to feelings of under-accomplishment which, thankfully, almost always disappear over varying periods of time to be replaced with preoccupations associated with moving on.
The NGSA examination, specifically, the disclosure of the results, opens a critical window through which one phase of the teaching/learning process is replaced by another. The results provide, in some instances, some of the earliest indicators regarding the potential to consolidate some of those indicators of the route of a more likely protracted academic journey. Here the point should be made that there are no guarantees of a predictable transition from one academic phase to another. The incremental transitions are usually attended to with increasing intellectual and dispositional challenges. What the outcomes of the NGSA challenge offer, however, are glimpses of dispositions towards academia and in the face of more demanding challenges.
As it happens, the release of this year’s NGSA results coincides with what one might call a ‘blighted’ period in our education system during which all sorts of ‘demons’ prevail not least a seeming deeper descent into in-school indiscipline and what appears to be the diminishing ability of those in authority to bring this deviant practice under control. Here, it has to be said that any such serious attempts – and few, if any, comes to mind – to bring an upgraded level of good order to the in-school behavioural standard have not been crowned with anything even remotely resembling success. In-school indiscipline has become one of the leading challenges to effective education delivery and the attempts by the Ministry of Education to rein in the practice has left no clearly discernable marks of success.
In contemplating this year’s NGSA results, it crosses one’s mind that there is surely something to be said for the youngsters and their parents who simply refused to have their efforts derailed by the protracted industrial action taken by their teachers, some of whom, we are told, returned their attention to their students outside the periods of active industrial action. There had, of course, been that other preceding consideration that had been significantly retarding the country’s education system.
Long before the collapse of the formal education delivery regime, resulting from the teachers’ industrial action, the already seeming tenuous grip which the authorities had on issues to do with good order, a sense of ‘anything goes’ was already being manifested in the manner in which violence was decidedly back-footing the teachers. This is where the impotence of the Ministry of Education manifested itself at its most prominent. When everything, including the in-school instability and the in-school trauma resulting from the industrial action are taken into consideration, some sort of award for sheer stamina ought surely to be struck for parents, children and teachers whose task it was to oversee the delivery of this year’s NGSA and the challenges associated therewith.
The Minister of Education’s terse remarks, shortly after the results were released, making clear the likely disposition of the Ministry to parents’ requests for transfers of children from the schools to which they have been assigned, from an image management perspective, comes across as not well though out. Here Minister Manickchand may well be ‘missing the bus’ altogether since, these days, it is as much parental concern over the reputations which some state-run schools have earned, seemingly for a lack of good order and the apparent inability of the Ministry of Education to arrest the problem that often motivates parental clamour for ‘transfers.’ Here, one feels that the surfeit of requests for student transfers is likely to diminish, considerably, if matters of discipline can be brought under control and if the issue of the ‘leveling up’ of the resources associated with education delivery can be addressed.
Minister Manickchand has gone on record as saying (to the NGSA students) that whichever school you get, you will be able to excel there. “Every school is getting the same resources, same trained teachers, more trained teachers, same text books, same and adequate furniture, same school grant to purchase materials, same cash grant, Because We Care… same everything.” That may be so except for the particular state of discipline in some schools.
