Grade Six Assessment
A former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education under the PPP/C administration, Mr Hydar Ally, had a letter published in this newspaper on Good Friday. He said that over thirteen thousand children ‘competed’ for less than a thousand places in senior secondary schools when they sat the Grade Six Assessment last week. This meant, he went on, that almost ninety per cent of them would be “forced to attend the general secondary schools, or in some cases primary tops…” In other words, in his view, they would be “condemned to a substandard quality of education delivery in public secondary schools.”
The solution, he said, was “for the government to expend more resources to upgrade the quality of the education delivery in all public schools throughout the country and by so doing phase out the highly competitive nature of the examination.” All children would then attend the secondary school in close proximity to where they lived, and all would benefit therefore “from a reasonably good secondary education.” He then moved on to assert that this is what the reforms in secondary education “initiated” by the previous PPP/C administration were intended to achieve, and that they were “critical” to “democratising” education − whatever that might be.
This is all very strange. It is perfectly true that the initial intention of the previous administration was to eventually abolish streaming in the school system, hence the introduction of ‘assessments’ rather than examinations. It might be noted, however, that it undermined its own stated intentions by transforming the Grades Two and Four Assessments into tests of a sort by incorporating some of the marks from both into the final computation of results for the Grade Six Assessment. As a consequence, the pernicious ‘extra lessons’ virus associated with Grade Six, began to infect Grades Two and Four as well. It was this government which brought a merciful end to that particular aberration.
Why Mr Ally should lecture the present administration about expending more resources to “upgrade the quality of education delivery in all public schools” when it has only been in office for two years, and the PPP/C had twenty-three years to accomplish that end, is not altogether clear. Education reform is a long-term business, and changes take a while to work their way through the system. Furthermore, he, of all people should remember that the Ministry of Education under his own government admitted that the present utilization of the Grade Six Assessment would have to stay for the foreseeable future because they could not bring all the secondary schools up to the same standard in the shorter term.