The T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) is call­ing for the Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) to be put off un­til a com­pre­hen­sive, well-de­signed pro­gramme is de­vel­oped.

The union said it was with­hold­ing sup­port for the pro­gramme be­cause sev­er­al con­cerns about it had not been ad­dressed by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion. That is al­so the po­si­tion of the Na­tion­al Pri­ma­ry School Prin­ci­pals' As­so­ci­a­tion (NPSPA). A pi­lot project which in­volves an el­e­ment of the CAC was in­tro­duced for Stan­dard Five pupils in Sep­tem­ber. TTUTA said the mIn­istry did not com­mu­ni­cate of­fi­cial­ly with prin­ci­pals about the pro­gramme and did not pro­vide a de­tailed im­ple­men­ta­tion plan.

The union al­so claims that prin­ci­pals were not trained and there was in­ad­e­quate "crash train­ing" for teach­ers. Phys­i­cal re­sources were not pro­vid­ed for the var­i­ous sub­ject ar­eas and CAC as­sis­tants as­signed to schools were not trained and had no clear iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of their roles in the pro­gramme.

TTUTA gen­er­al sec­re­tary Pe­ter Wil­son said: "Over­all, there con­tin­ues to be a vast dis­par­i­ty in the teach­ing re­sources avail­able to schools through­out the coun­try for the teach­ing of the dif­fer­ent sub­ject ar­eas and so schools are not on a lev­el play­ing field.

"As well, there is need for spe­cial at­ten­tion to is­sues con­cern­ing the re­li­a­bil­i­ty, va­lid­i­ty and stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of these in­ter­nal as­sess­ment com­po­nents over the 500-plus pri­ma­ry schools through­out the coun­try, if the as­sess­ment is to be mean­ing­ful and fair to all the na­tion's chil­dren."