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 Nailah Robinson
I note that the Ministry of Education is scheduling talks on the return to face-to-face classes. I have a radical suggestion – let us only bring back those in 4th form and up.
The rest can stay online or even on an extended break while we use this ‘pause’ to completely revamp our education system. COVID has been a naturally occurring disruptor and provides a good opportunity for necessary change.
Stakeholders would then have the time between April and September for consultation, planning, retraining, reorganisation and implementation – the two months of summer are not enough. What kind of revamping do we need? Here are my thoughts: 1. 67 per cent of our children leave school without adequate certification and it has been this way for over 20 years.
The system that exists clearly serves only the minority and possibly actively harms a significant portion.
(For many of the struggling students, when they move to different systems, such as the adult education system in the US, they come to realise that they were always capable and competent – it was just that there were no pathways for them in Barbados.)
2. The 11 Plus is celebrated because, unlike a system based on “who-you-know”, it is a fair way of ensuring that “bright” children have a chance to enter the “best schools” and have the best opportunities.
But there is something inherently unfair about this concept. It is certainly better than the “who-you-know” approach, but should there really be “best schools” to begin with?
3. In fact, a case could be made that our system is extremely discriminatory. At present we have “matching” – each parent/child ranks their favourite schools. After the 11 Plus, the computer programme takes the children with the highest grades and assigns them to their first choice.
Then it takes the children with the second-highest grades and assigns them to their first choice. If there is no space, then those children go to their second choice and so on. As one makes one’s way down this list, the range of choices becomes fewer because the schools have filled up.
Is it discriminatory that certain children have free choice of school and others do not? Especially given the correlation between performance and socioeconomic standing?
4. If the purpose of the 11 Plus is to segregate students into levels based on their performance (as has often been stated), perhaps then we should remove parent choice completely.
What would happen if this year the Ministry assigned the 100 children with the best results to [insert name of currently stigmatised school] and then the next 100 to [insert name of another currently stigmatised school]? All children would then be with other children of their performance level.
Would we be comfortable with this idea? Would the children who are performing under the top 30 pe cent then receive the support that they need?
5. It is worth noting that a zone-based approach does not make much sense for secondary schools given that the schools are not really correlated to the population areas. In other words, there will always be children who have to travel to school.
How do we choose these children? How do we allocate them to schools? Our present system of partial zoning is not ideal because parents cannot choose the school that is most convenient for their work/extended family but are restricted to the zones in which they live.
It is also worth noting that our method of allocation for primary schools is not ideal either: the small rural schools, which pull from their districts, significantly underperform the overcrowded urban schools which take children from all over. (At least such was the case in the last publicly
available report, 14 years ago in 2007.)
6. There are a lot of changes to be made: we need more social and psychological support for our primary and secondary children, we need more educational support for those who are left behind as early as Infants A, we need to heed the calls of the unions in relation to the management of teachers, we need to get rid of political and incompetent boards, we need more transparency about the system’s results.
Although the focus of this letter has been on the 11 Plus, it is clear that the whole system needs to be revamped. I suggest that the best time to do so is now, while we are already disrupted.
All children can learn. Some will run past the post and some will walk. But right now 67 per cent of our children do not reach the finish line at all (compared with 18 per cent in the UK). And our children deserve better than this.
