#BTColumn – Education: the primary foundation

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today Inc.

by Ralph Jemmott

In a ‘Letter to the Editor’ entitled ‘Building a solid education Foundation,’ Walter Edey notes, and rightly so, that “an educational system is a complex multi-purpose knowledge network.” The super-structure of any education system like of any physical edifice, rests on the strength and security of its foundation.

Barbados is apparently embarking on a comprehensive reform of its education system. This would be a very ambitious project, fraught with dangers and unintended consequences. The Minister of Education might be advised firstly, to examine thefoundational structure of primary education and try to remedy the deficiencies at that stage.

One is wary of comprehensive reform at this time, for two reasons. One is the unsettled state of local schooling, adjusting to the threat of COVID 19. The other is the fact that many of the deep thinkers on education, the likes of Leonard Shorey, Earl Newton and Gladstone Holder are no longer with us.

Education is in part about process, but more fundamentally, it is about outcomes, or performance on both the cognitive and affective levels.

No one knows what would constitute the optimum performance of any school system. Generally speaking judgments about educational outcomes in Barbados tend to be based on performance at three levels.

The first is performance in the Barbados Secondary Entrance Exam (BSSEE) or the Eleven Plus introduced in 1959. The second test of performance is the results of the Caribbean Secondary Examination Council (CSEC) exams usually taken after five years of Secondary placement.

The third is the performance in the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Exams (CAPE), which replaced the Oxford and Cambridge Advanced levels.

The Common Entrance marks are still used as the prime “direct” indicator of Primary school proficiency. Thus we would first have to ascertain precisely how well or how poorly the local primary system performs over a substantive period of time.

One would suggest an examination of the marks over eight years or so, looking at what percentage of students obtain between 80 to 100 per cent, between 60 and 79 per cent, between 40 and 59 per cent and between 25 and 39 and how many consistently score below 25.

This might give an idea of how realistically the system might be expected to perform. Based on the results, the education authorities could diagnose what interventionist, remedial and affirmative measures need to be taken. Bear in mind that no universal examination will ever produce 100 per cent efficiency.

A 1989 study showed that 20 per cent of children entering secondary school in Trinidad and Tobago were deficient in literacy and numeracy skills.

An analysis might reveal a wide range of causal factors relating to the failure of primary schools to, in Dennis Craig’s word “confer high educational proficiency on the same constant proportion of pupils attending school.”

Some could relate to physiological, genetically inherited factors in children, to cognitive deficiency, to material conditions or to serious cultural deficits in the child’s background.

Still too many children languish in Primary school without the authorities trying to find out what problems they have.

The less fortunate are left in the D streams often with the less able teachers because the reputation of the school rests on top results in the Common Entrance. This has to stop,
but it is deeply engrained in the socio-educational culture.

A major criticism of primary school performance in Barbados is that too many students enter the secondary system, to pursue a post-primary curriculum, having failed to satisfy the requirements of the primary.

In 2002, the inter-American Development Bank’s published, “Access, Equity and Performance: Education in Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.”

For Barbados, it notes that in 1994, out of 4,444 students who took the Eleven Plus, 958 or 21.6 per cent scored below 30 points in English. In 1995, out of 4,087 candidates, 915 scored below 30, representing 22.4 per cent.

In the 1998 Mathematics test, the mean score for both boys and girls was 47.6 per cent, rising to 52.6 four years later. Given the realities of Barbadian life, as it affects children across the spectrum, one might ask, what would constitute what Edey calls “performing optimally.”

One analysis of the performance of primary education in Barbados came out of a UNESCO conference held in Jonkien.

The chapter on Barbados concluded that primary schooling here was doing “as well as might be expected” but warned that “inefficiencies are creeping into the system.”

One wonders how many “inefficiencies” have crept in to the system since then. Material poverty is invariably a factor in a child’s underachievement. In 1997 the poverty level in Barbados was 14 per cent of the population.

One suspects that with the growth of a socio-economic underclass, more children may be living with some degree of economic and socio-cultural deprivation.

This is part of the problem in Britain with underachieving white working class boys who are performing recognisably worse than any other segment of the British school population.

There are many contestable notions in education. One that is seldom contested is that children from better material and culturally privileged backgrounds tend to do better academically.

This is not because they are genetically superior but because their environment is more enabling. Nurture can assist Nature or it can stultify Nature.

I tend to favour a system of continuous assessment. This is not so much as a means of determining transfer to secondary schooling, but as a diagnostic tool to ascertain how primary school age students across the board are progressing or falling behind at critical stages of cognitive/affective development.

The assessments will be done at ages seven, nine and eleven. They would be island-wide tests, done at the primary school and corrected by the teachers. Based on the results, compensatory, remedial schooling will be provided to all students who the exams show to be underperforming. If necessary, such students will spend two years in Class 4.

One of the great dangers in primary education is overcrowding the curriculum. Children attend school between 9 and 3, Monday to Friday. Not everything which it is useful to know can be crammed into the primary syllabus.

The primary curriculum is a primer. Its prime purpose is to guarantee that students have the basic cognitive literacy and numeracy skills to progress to the secondary level.

For a number of reasons, not all students will achieve this goal. The primary curriculum should have no ties to the so-called “world of work”. To say that a child at age ten or eleven should become a carpenter or a computer expert is to propagate a pontifical nonsense.

Language skills, more specifically reading comprehension and numeracy skills are at the backbone of primary schooling. Some space should be left for elements of Social Studies and Integrated Sciences, Physical Education and some artistic/creative expression in the child’s area of interest and ability.

Regrettably schools have limited control of the wider lives of the children into whose care they are entrusted.

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.