Children not ready for Grade Six assessment

Dear Editor,

I am hopeful that whatever plans are in the pipeline for the sitting of the National Grade Six Assessment, they are rooted in safety and not following in CXC’s footsteps of what I consider a barefaced move. As a parent and a concerned Guyanese, I

would like to share my views, with the hope that the Ministry of Education can see some essence in my thought.

First of all, the Ministry of Education must act on the advice of the National Covid-19 Task Force, hence I am hoping that the Education representative on the Task force truly understands the dynamics of education and the implication that premature reopening of schools and more so administration of the NGSA may have. School has been closed for more than two months, one may argue that the grade six pupils would have covered the curriculum by the time schools were shut. As a parent of a grade six child, I can tell the policymakers, that the children are not ready for the examinations. In my opinion, they must go through at least a month of pupilteacher contact or re-acclimatization before they are back in examination mode. The longer school stays closed, the farther these 10 and 11 year olds are away from examination readiness. Remember, as much as they would have been ‘home schooled’, three months or more of home schooling cannot get them ready to sit this very important examination. Parents are not the experts at formal academia. If another thought is that children would have been using the online resources available to them, then this is discrimination. What about the children in the Hinterland?

Secondly, has the examination been reformatted, or will it be? CXC has revised theirs, only paper one will be written. If the Ministry is thinking about announcing a date for NGSA within two months, say by July, then I’m hoping that the format of the examination has been revised. Children cannot simply write four papers of a full paper 1 and paper 2, this is not business as usual. Let me remind the Ministry of Education of what happened in 2016. Should you move prematurely, without giving it all possible thought, then we are staring down the barrel of the 2016 results gun, just four times over.