Friday brought the announcement of the National Grade Six Assessment results. Fifteen thousand, two hundred and seventy-three candidates sat the exam on May 3rd and 4th this year, so the provision of outcomes has been commendably prompt. Nowadays the Education Ministry works with CXC which supplies technical input to develop the test items, although the subjects covered have not changed. It also marks the papers.
The traditional four subject areas are English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies, and in delivering his synopsis of this year’s results, Mr Terry Rajan, CXC’s Senior Manager of Examinations Administration and Security, said there had been a significant improvement in passes in Maths compared to 2022. The rate this year stood at 39.87 per cent as compared to 34.77 percent last year.
“The performance of Mathematics aligned better to 2020 over 2022,” he said, going on to observe that “2023 shows a significant upward mobility in candidates obtaining full marks.” It has to be noted, of course, that the 2020 results were pre-pandemic, while the 2022 ones would still have been affected by the disruptions to schooling during the Covid era. This year’s assessments, in contrast, come in the wake of a more extended period of standard formal instruction. As it is, the Ministry will no doubt be relieved to find that in terms of results for the most challenging of the four subjects, the damage wrought by the pandemic interruptions may possibly be more limited than initially feared.
There was also a marginal improvement in English scores with the pass rate recorded as 64.47 per cent as against 64 per cent last year. That, it might be argued, did not represent much of an improvement, especially as Mr Rajan did not go on to compare it with the pre-pandemic result. However, he did state that the trend in respect of zero marks in English had remained relatively flat over the last four years, although he did not make public what that rate was, either for this subject or for that matter, any of the others either. While it is useful to learn that it is not increasing, it would have been far more helpful for gauging overall performance if the percentage had been revealed.
As in the case of Maths, Science also saw an improvement, in fact, quite a significant one. The number of pupils attaining a pass of 50 per cent or more increased from 46.45 in 2022 to 55.11 this year. Again, how this compares to the 2020 scores was not disclosed, which is a pity, since as already mentioned, comparisons with that year are more meaningful than those relating to the Covid years. What Mr Rajan did say, however, was that 2023 was the first year in a four-year period when more candidates gained full marks than zero in Science. This is surely good news, but could the public not be told what the percentages were?
Then there is the matter of Social Studies, which has been a problematic paper in the past, although whether it remains so is not known. There was a slight decline in performance of 0.3 per cent from last year when it recorded 58.9 per cent as opposed to 58.57 per cent in 2023. Whether this is of any importance in the larger educational scheme of things depends on if the syllabus on which the paper is based has been revamped or not.
Social Studies is supposed to test knowledge, conceptual understanding and the use of knowledge, but given the way the syllabus was traditionally structured it did not aid in conceptual understanding let alone the use of knowledge. Furthermore, the historical information in particular, was very much outdated, and was organised in bits and pieces, not in a story form accessible to primary school children. Then there was all the data on government, Caricom and the like, which was dry as dust and would have been fairly meaningless to students of that age. It would have simply required a great deal of rote learning, and would have proved a particular challenge to interior children.
Whether the syllabus has been updated and modernised to provide relevant information and help children’s understanding of current issues such as climate change, the environment (in the larger sense and not just public hygiene which has always been included), associated topics such as flooding, or oil, to give a few examples, is not something which anyone outside the Ministry has been told.
One matter of interest from Mr Rajan’s presentation was his observation that female pupils continued to outperform males in every subject area. This should be a concern to the Ministry. It is not that anyone seeks a reversion to years in the distant past when boys outperformed girls; it is just that they should be attaining results relatively on par with their female counterparts. It has been noted, not just here but elsewhere in the world too, that far more females than males pursue education at the tertiary level, so we are not the only ones to confront the issue of how to stimulate and sustain boys’ interest in education.
One other detail from Mr Rajan which may have drawn the public’s attention was the fact that this year 287 Spanish-speaking students sat the exam. It would be interesting to know – in a very general sense, of course – how they performed, so one could get an idea of how they were adapting to the local school system, as well as a foreign language.
While the Grade Six tests were originally intended to be assessments with no consequences for future schooling, they are in effect examinations, because on them depend the placements for the leading secondary schools. There have been calls for the abolition of the NGSA, and for every pupil to graduate to the nearest secondary school in their area, but even supposing that were desirable, and that is by no means necessarily the case, it is simply not possible at the present time.
In the first instance it would require that all secondary schools were equal, and at the moment this is simply not so. While secondary schools continue to be built – most recently work will start on those at Tuschen and Hosororo – there are still schools such as the 80 odd primary tops in existence. These will no doubt gradually disappear, but it will not happen overnight.
In the meantime it has to be remarked that not all primary schools are equal either. The quality of education in the interior is a particular problem, and even although numbers are very much smaller there, it was still noticeable that their representation among the top performers at NGSA was limited.
It is far easier to recruit teachers for urban areas than hinterland communities, in addition to which towns and townships have infinitely more facilities for learning than do small interior villages. Until the Ministry works out a way to create greater balance in terms of primary education between the urban centres and the interior, Georgetown particularly, followed by some of the coastal areas will continue to provide the largest share of the top performers.
