Leaders of the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are set to discuss poor performance in Mathematics by children across the region.
And already President Irfaan Ali is suggesting that declining grades in that subject might be due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The issue of Mathematics has now captured the attention of every single head of state and prime minister in the region, and it is now an agenda for the Heads of Government in CARICOM. That is to tell you the issues and challenges that we face,” he said at the commissioning of the new Yarrowkabra Secondary School on Thursday.
The Barbados-based Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) last month reported that only 36 per cent of students across the region received passing grades for Mathematics at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), a seven percentage point decrease compared to last year.
CXC’s Director of Operations Dr Nicole Manning emphasised the need for improvement in each territory.
Dr Ali said Prime Minister Mia Mottley recently told him that she intended to take the issue of Maths to the next CARICOM Summit slated for February 2025 because she believed that the region was in a crisis in Mathematics.
“It is not a Jamaica issue, Barbados issue, Trinidad issue or your Guyana issue. It has now become a collective issue that we must address and here in Guyana, we have to be innovative,” he said.
With Guyana having recorded a CSEC Mathematics’ pass rate of 31 per cent in 2024 compared to 34 per cent last year, President Ali o pondered whether the declining rate of success was linked to the more than two-year-long COVID-19 pandemic.
“Now also COVID, Mathematics required more direct contact, more group, more analytics, more teachers-to-student relationship, more teaching time, whether COVID itself had a greater impact on students’ performance in Mathematics than other subject areas, because you can read and follow in other subject areas, but in Mathematics, you need to have more problem-solving approach. You have to do formulas, understand formulas, understand analytics. That can be also an offshoot of the problem of COVID,” he said.
( Demerarawaves/BT)
