Michelle A Eng Leang

A group of dis­grun­tled par­ents sat in a hall­way at Tran­quil­li­ty Sec­ondary School yes­ter­day await­ing the ar­rival of Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter, Dr Tim Gopeesingh, who nev­er showed. One by one, they stood up to voice their lack of sup­port for the pro­posed changes to the cur­ricu­lum, all on the cusp of their chil­dren en­ter­ing stan­dard five to sit the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­ams.

The changes will come with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) which promis­es "au­then­tic as­sess­ment," ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion. Par­ents were against the tim­ing of CAC's im­ple­men­ta­tion, wor­ried that their chil­dren were al­ready un­der tremen­dous pres­sure to per­form for the SEA to now be asked to cope with ad­di­tion­al sub­jects.

Dionne Spears-Fron­tin, par­ent of a Stan­dard Four boy, said: "My prob­lem is not that they want to in­tro­duce this, but how they want to im­ple­ment it. My child is in stan­dard four and is about to write ex­ams next year and in Stan­dard Five, you want to bring five new sub­jects that he was nev­er for­mal­ly ex­posed to and test him on it."

Spears-Fron­tin says it is too much and is "strong­ly against them do­ing that." She feels the pro­gramme should be im­ple­ment­ed on an in­cre­men­tal ba­sis. An­toinette Joseph's son is al­so in Stan­dard Four and she raised her con­cerns. "These chil­dren are 11 years old and their bod­ies are chang­ing. They are deal­ing with pu­ber­ty. There is noth­ing wrong with con­tin­ued as­sess­ment but our schools are not catered for it. In a re­cent meet­ing on this, the teach­ers were con­fused. The fa­cil­i­ta­tors could not an­swer the ques­tions of the par­ents. And we have nowhere to turn. How can we teach chil­dren some­thing that we don't even un­der­stand?"