Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training, Kay McConney, believes that the ministry’s standards must improve as it seeks to transform the education system to one that is fair, inclusive, relevant, and modern.
Following the announcement of the 2024 Barbados Secondary School Entrance Examination results on Monday, Ms. McConney said her Ministry is proposing to have a national standards initiative across the education system.
She noted that it would be transparent in highlighting the standards each child needs to achieve, and in strengthening the standards and practice of teachers to improve the quality of instruction and professional development.
The Minister expressed concern about this year’s results and a performance review conducted of the nation’s children over a 10-year period. Referring to the review, she stated that the Ministry could not continue to be satisfied with an average of 22 per cent of students scoring below 50 per cent in the English examination, and an average of 46 per cent of students who score below 50 per cent in Mathematics.
“We are, therefore, as a Ministry on a mission to develop standards that will enable every school to rise to become a good school in the teaching of Mathematics, the teaching of English and of all the other core subjects, as well as the additional subjects. Every school must rise to become a good school and that means that our emphasis must be on standards,” she added.
Ms. McConney further stated that through education transformation, the Ministry wants to have principals effectively plan instruction to assess the skills and the competencies of their students, so that plans or programmes could be designed with the students’ needs in mind.
She added that the Ministry has a lot of work to do and will place focus on not just the enhancement of the overall physical infrastructure of schools but the digital infrastructure as well.
“We have to enhance the overall physical infrastructure of the schools because we know that not all schools have access to the same facilities, and even when they have access to facilities not all facilities are maintained at a level they want to be.
“We will have to strengthen and institutionalise profiles and the operational functioning of this Ministry. This Ministry, as it is currently structured, needs to build its capacity and its competencies in several areas to be able to administer and have oversight for a modern education system, and so the work that we have to do is not just at the school level, it has to be at the ministry level,” she stressed.
Minister McConney also mentioned one of the avenues created to improve the physical infrastructure of the schools and added that the public would be able to see the results in the coming weeks.
“We asked the architects of Barbados to help us to reimagine what schools would look like at the primary, the secondary, the special needs and at the nursery level. We asked them to send those concepts in, based on particular briefs, for what we want for the 21st century school,” she said.