Education Minister Dr Tim Gopeesingh has described as "alarming," the high failure rate in the country's education. He said out of the 17,000 pupils who wrote the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination each year, only 2,000 attained five Advanced Level subjects, including English and mathematics. "So from 17,000, only 2,000 end up Advanced Level one to three at CAPE," Gopeesingh said. He added that annually, about 15,000 students "have been falling through the cracks." Gopeesingh made the disclosure during yesterday's post-Cabinet news conference at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair.
He said a ratio of one in every 20 students scored higher than 90 per cent; one in ten scored over 30 per cent and one out of two scored less than 30 per cent. Gopeesingh said only 13,000 students registered for five subjects or more in Form Five. "So more than 3,500 of these do not enter for more than five subjects," he said. "And out of these 13,000 who write five subjects or more, approximately 6,500 pass five subjects, including maths and English." He said the Government would introduce "intervention strategies" in the primary school to address the problem.
He said emphasis would be placed at the Early Childhood Care and Education Centres. "Our intervention policy is to stem the tide of this failure of almost 15,000 of the 17,000 students falling out of the system," he added. He said the new measures in numeracy and literacy would be introduced in first and second-year pupils and also Standard One in primary schools. He said the National Test results also showed a high percentage of students perform below the desired standards.
