President of the Guyana Teacher’s Union (GTU) Colin Bynoe yesterday said that the union will add its voice on the Education Ministry’s Automatic Promotion policy after an upcoming general council meeting.
“We are putting together a comprehensive report,” Bynoe told this newspaper yesterday via the telephone.
According to Bynoe, the GTU has to give the go ahead for “certain things” to be done. The council meeting is scheduled for December 21.
In May of this year, a circular, ‘Grade Repetition Retention and Automatic Promotion’, was distributed among schools by the Chief Education Officer.
According to the Education Minister Shaik Baksh, the policy was adopted after a three-year survey among the secondary schools found that on average 80 percent of students who were made to repeat a class later dropped out of school.
The Automatic Promotion policy gained media attention in November when Linden’s Christianburg Secondary School Head Teacher Cleveland Thomas was summoned before the Teaching Service Commission for not promoting low achievers.
