Earlier last month Minister of Education Shaik Baksh announced that his ministry would prohibit the holding of ‘extra lessons’ on public school premises once the payment of money was involved. This announcement came while he was speaking at a special meeting of parents, as well as of students attending schools in the North-East Georgetown Educational District. It might be remarked that this is not a new ban; it has been imposed before by Mr Baksh’s predecessors, and since he is now re-issuing it, one can only presume that the earlier prohibitions have been totally ineffectual.
Stabroek News reported the Minister as saying that the “lessons syndrome is hitting the educational system hard,” and he expressed the view that many of the teachers who offered extra lessons after school short-changed their pupils during normal school hours. He is certainly not mistaken about this, although to exactly what percentage of the teaching work-force it applies is perhaps a moot point. However, there is no shortage of anecdotal stories about teachers putting pressure on their pupils to attend their extra-lessons classes either directly or indirectly.
What the ministry has failed to acknowledge is that it has made the problem worse by including marks from the Grade Two and Four Assessments in the final Grade Six Assessment, which is being used to place students in the top secondary schools in the country. In the days of the Secondary Schools Entrance Examination (SSEE) which was designed to place all pupils for post-primary purposes, the extra-lessons syndrome was confined to the older children because only the marks from this test were taken into consideration. The Grade Six Assessment is, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same exam as the SSEE, but as indicated above, there is a change in how the final marks are computed.
These columns have previously pointed out the inherent unfairness of including marks from assessments taken years earlier in the final result of an 11+ exam, but that is not the worst of it. At the time the assessments were introduced, parents were told they were a means merely for the ministry to gauge how their children were doing, and which schools, perhaps, were encountering special difficulties which needed to be addressed. Owing to the fact that Grades Two and Four marks now have a role to play in the secondary placement scheme of things, however, these assessments have been transformed into full-fledged exams, and parents have responded accordingly. Now we have little tots carting book bags being ferried to after-school lessons by their parents.
If the Minister wants to do something immediately to reduce the scope of the extra lessons problem, therefore, he could simply announce that marks from the first two assessments won’t count for anything; they will simply serve as a guide for the education authorities to identify problems – just as everyone was told when they were first introduced. That will still leave the extra lessons for Grade Six, of course, until it ceases altogether to be a placement mechanism for the top secondary schools, which is the ministry’s ultimate objective.
Even when that happens, however, it will not stop the extra lessons phenomenon altogether, although it will probably shunt it on a larger scale into the secondary system (where it already exists), rather than the primary one. At that level there will still be exams to sit in the form of CXC − exams, it should be said, which are not only crucial to students’ future careers, but which cannot be wished away by the ministry like the SSEE.
When the ministry does end the use of the Grade Six Assessment as a secondary school placement exercise, it will cause any parents who can scrape up the fees to send their children to private schools. Those who cannot afford this, but who have ambitions for their children, will probably resort to the somewhat less expensive extra lessons once again. In the end, extra lessons feed on a public school system which is not delivering as it should, and on salary scales where teachers feel the need and see the opportunity to augment their incomes.
As things stand, the education system cannot deliver because it simply does not have enough qualified teachers, not least of all at the secondary level. As we have repeated often enough in these columns, if there is an insufficiency of competent teachers, it doesn’t matter what programme or project the Ministry of Education dreams up, nothing will change fundamentally. And encouraging enough good teachers to come into the public schools means being prepared to pay them at least competitive Caribbean rates, and also addressing the inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the educational bureaucracy which cause school staff such frustration.
