Letter writing contest boosts soft skills among youth

This year’s National Letter Writing Competition once again challenged students, aged 10 to 15, across Barbados to tackle complex issues through the written word, helping them to develop critical soft skills like communication, creativity, and empathy.

During the brief award ceremony held at the General Post Office last Friday, Deputy Chief Education Officer Julia Beckles noted the competition’s growing importance in the Ministry’s broader educational transformation strategy.

“We have just recently renewed our focus on literacy. I say renewed because it has always been one of the areas that we have placed emphasis on, but we were rather eclectic in the way we dealt with literacy in the past. We have decided that it will be a part of our transformational agenda and that we will pay special attention to the way we indeed ensure that our students are doing their best in literacy and at some point in time our adults,” she said.

“Recently we have rolled out our new literacy programmes in all primary schools, in 10 of our secondary schools, in three of our special schools, and this saw our teachers being trained in either the Lindamood-Bell programme or the Snappy Sounds Seeing Stars. So literacy is a big deal.”

Deputy Chief Education Officer Julia Beckles.

Beckles explained that letter writing remains deeply relevant in today’s learning environment, despite advances in technology that have diminished interest in the format among today’s digital-first generation.

“Letter writing bolsters social and emotional learning,” she said. “That is also one of our pillars of educational transformation. So we are going to take an activity that all of us have been evolving at some point in our lives, an activity from way back, and we can still show its relevance today in most social and emotional learning, and it also bolsters communication and creativity. Those soft skills that we are talking about that we’re seeing are missing in today’s students. So we can see why it is important that we continue to have this letter writing competition.”

This year’s first-place winner, 13-year-old Adesh Parasram of St Leonard’s Boys’ School, demonstrated exactly that kind of awareness in his award-winning letter. Choosing to write about the global issue of ocean pollution, Parasram took a deep dive into the topic of littering and its environmental impact.

He said, “I feel great that I won, because all of the work paid off. What got me interested was the topic, because I like picking up a challenge, and I thought it would have been interesting, so I did it.

“My letter was about how everyone is polluting the ocean and how we could prevent and solve the problems. I did a lot of research… when I say a lot [I mean] a lot. I watched a couple videos, [and] I used Guatemala for example of how their beach is filled with plastics,” he said.