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Severe deficits

by Barbados Today
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The Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) is urging Government to pause its plans to abolish the 11-plus exam and instead focus on implementing measures to address “severe” learning deficiencies being seen among Class 4 students.

President of the union Rudy Lovell told Barbados TODAY that there was a “vast” number of students entering secondary school with “shocking” deficiencies, including inability to spell their names and even form letters properly.

And he insisted that the Ministry of Education should seek to fix these issues before changing the method used to transition students from primary to secondary school.

“. . . . Focus on the primary schools first, resolve the issues in the primary school and then we can look to implement anything after that . . . . When you are building a house you start with the foundation. We believe that the primary school system is the foundation of education in Barbados. So, if you want to strengthen the house, you should start by strengthening the foundation so there are no cracks,” the union leader said.

Lovell was speaking exclusively to Barbados TODAY on Monday, after an education reform town hall meeting that was part of the BUT’s Teachers’ Week activities, at the union’s headquarters in Merry Hill, Welches Road, St Michael.

“Based on the proposals put down by the Ministry of Education to do away with the Barbados Secondary School Entrance Examination (BSSEE) [and] introduce academies of excellence and junior academies, the membership of the Barbados Union of Teachers is of the view that the Ministry of Education should focus firmly on the primary school system to eradicate any issues that would lead students to leave primary school into secondary school with deficiencies,” he said.

“It is a major concern because even if we focus on the academies of excellence and junior academies, we are still leaving the primary school system untouched and the problems that exist in the primary schools will continue and those students will filter into the secondary schools, which will be the academies of excellence and junior academies.”

Identifying some of the deficits, Lovell said education authorities needed to make fixing them a priority.

“From what we are being told by our membership, there are some deficiencies that can be remedied with intervention at the primary school system . . . . Some may be shocking to the general public. Some students can’t actually write their name, can’t form letters. There are a number of issues that we feel should be remedied before we look at having academies of excellence and junior academies.

“Both categories of teachers [primary and secondary] spoke today, and the primary school teachers who consisted of principals have indicated that the issues in the primary schools are vast. There are severe issues in the primary schools that need to be rectified to ensure that students who transition from primary to secondary school can do so with the ability to make it in their school,” the BUT head said.

“Some of these problems can be rectified by greater parental support, identification of the problems at an earlier age, and trying to address the problems earlier than waiting till they are in secondary school.”

Lovell contended that schools also need additional support personnel, especially at the primary level.

“Smaller class sizes would also assist in addressing critical issues. Improved working conditions, effective leadership and decision-making, additional training opportunities for teachers and a dedicated parental programme to assist them in understanding the importance of education would also assist in resolving some of the challenges, especially at the foundation level,” he added.

On February 4, during the first sitting of Parliament after Barbados became a republic, President Dame Sandra Mason announced Government’s plan to replace the Education Act of 1983 with legislation that is more suited to modern developments in the education sector and focused on problem-solving, critical thinking and life-long learning. She added that the BSSEE would be abolished and replaced with a middle school system.

Then in July, Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw announced that a reform paper on the move towards abolishing the examination was before Prime Minister Mia Mottley and a decision on the way forward was imminent.

“Teachers believe reform should come from action research done by teachers in our classrooms and that should guide the direction of any reform,” Lovell told Barbados TODAY.

The BUT’s concerns about the learning deficits among Class 4 students also come three months after the publication of a report by the World Bank Group and UNICEF which stated that four in five sixth-graders – 11- to 12-year-old students – in Latin America and the Caribbean are expected to lack basic reading comprehension proficiency because of the two years of school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report released in July, Two Years After: Saving a Generation, added that while Barbados and other Caribbean states were facing a learning crisis prior to the pandemic, the situation had worsened.

Although acknowledging the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education of the nation’s youth, Lovell said some of the current challenges preceded the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The crop of first formers that are at [some] schools, based on conversations I had with some of the teachers, are quite restless. They would have been online for the last two years and they were not in a structured environment where they would have to sit and keep order.

“More of the recent issues may be attributed to the online environment, but issues existed long before the advent of online teaching,” he said.

sheriabrathwaite@barbadostoday.bb

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