When the results of Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations were released last month, Houston Secondary was not featured among the schools turning out top performers.
However, almost a decade since its students began sitting the CSEC exams, what some consider a “cowboy school” has been continuing to achieve small victories.
Houston Secondary, which is a C-grade school, has three programmes, including a six-year programme that caters for students who would have been left behind and prepares them for promotion to grade seven; and a Secondary Competency Certificate Programme (SCCP) that is offered at grades nine and ten, where the students do their four core subjects and an elective. Upon completing this programme, children can choose whether they want to continue on to the third programme or not, which is writing CSEC. If they choose to leave having written the SCCP, they can go on to pursue studies at a technical facility, such as the Carnegie School, the Guyana Technical Institute, GITC, or Kuru Kuru Cooperative College.
