Education expert slams PM’s school expulsion idea as ‘political strategy’

An education expert has criticised Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s recent proposal to end secondary school expulsions at age 16, describing it as a politically motivated initiative that ignores fundamental problems within Barbados’ education system.

Responding to Mottley’s appeal for a more rehabilitative approach to student delinquency, Dr Ian Marshall acknowledged that while the proposed initiative “sounds good on paper”, it comes too late in the lives of many troubled students and misdiagnoses the root of the problem.

“If you are genuinely interested in helping me, help me at the stage where the problem emerges,” he insisted. “When I’m in primary school, when I can’t read or write and have learning difficulties, meet me there. Facilitate my development there and then. Don’t come when I’m 16 and 17 and 18 cause I represent a voter now. Don’t trick me. Don’t trick me with that because that is a political strategy.”

Last month, the prime minister had urged educators to stop expelling badly behaved students from the system at age 16, proposing instead training with the Barbados Defence Force or the Barbados Youth Advance Corps. She said her administration had already requested the chief education officer to give principals the directive to abandon the practice, adding that this move was part of the government’s commitment to address antisocial behaviour among youth and provide a second chance for at-risk teens.

In April during an Ideas Forum in St Joseph she said: “Even the ones that are giving trouble — we’ve asked the Chief Education Officer to talk to the principals and let us get them to go back to school in uniform; stop sending people out of school at 16 in the middle of the school year . . . So that we do not send them out of school to sit on the block, . . . “If you have youngsters who can train to be the best across every single discipline — including surfing — let us know. The government will find a way to finance it . . .”

But Dr Marshall, a lecturer in education at the University of the West Indies, contends that such interventions fail to deal with the causative factors.

“You can’t just expel them and leave them there because… they really become social problems later on,” he warned. “But when you say that you can expel them at 16, you are still really not addressing the cause- what is causing them to get to a place… that the only thing you can find to reach them is to expel them and send them to a halfway house?”

“It is really an admission that our school system has failed these children yet again. We like to deal with the problem after it has mushroomed. But research shows over and over again that it’s far easier to rehabilitate students at the early stage than at the later stage.”

According to Dr Marshall, by the time youth reach 16 or 17, many are already hardened by years of exposure to dysfunction, making rehabilitation a far more difficult and resource-intensive task.

“At that stage, when a child gets 16 or 18 years old and he or she is bent in a particular direction… it is like the tree has already become so accustomed, grown to that point,” he explained. “So you’re really going to be trying to break children… already basically young adults.”

Dr Marshall also questioned the viability of the government’s proposed training programme in changing entrenched behaviour, and expressed scepticism about the post-training prospects for youth who complete it especially if their peers who did not undergo the training are gainfully employed.

“When they come out and they get certificates… who is going to absorb them into the workplace? Where are they going to find jobs?” he asked. “Unless the government has a programme that is going to employ these people over the long haul, all that is going to happen is that you are really delaying the inevitability of them returning quote-unquote to their vomit, so to speak.”

He reiterated that early intervention, particularly at the primary level, would be a more effective and fiscally responsible strategy.

“Give me [the money] and I’m going to create a programme that is going to reach students in primary school and early in the first year of secondary school,” Dr Marshall proposed. “I will spend that money and show you that I can create programmes that will reach those students far earlier and be far more successful.”

Dr Marshall painted a stark picture of the home environments from which many at-risk children emerge, arguing that by 16, their behavioural patterns are deeply entrenched.

“If you come up in a household and every morning, your role is to roll spliffs to get them to be sold that day at school… how are you going to reach me when I’m 16 years old?” he asked. “That is your norm.”

He called for the re-establishment of a residential boot camp-type facility—not merely day programmes—where at-risk children could be completely removed from toxic environments.

“If it was residential, I have you for three weeks. You can’t go home. You can’t go back to your friends,” Dr Marshall reasoned. “I am more likely to change your behaviour because you are now living in an environment where you can be reshaped and moulded.”

sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb