Resh­ma Ra­goonath

The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion?is claim­ing suc­cess fol­low­ing yes­ter­day's first prac­tice as­sess­ment of the con­tro­ver­sial Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC)-Cre­ative Writ­ing. In a re­lease yes­ter­day the min­istry said: "Over 95 per cent of the as­sess­ment pack­ages were col­lect­ed and dis­trib­uted to schools for fa­cil­i­ta­tion of (yes­ter­day's) prac­tice as­sess­ment."

The min­istry said spe­cial con­sid­er­a­tion had been giv­en to schools un­able to col­lect due to cir­cum­stances out­side their con­trol. Six schools in the St Patrick Ed­u­ca­tion Dis­trict were un­able to col­lect their pack­ages due to a protest by res­i­dents who blocked the road in the area. Yes­ter­day's writ­ing as­sess­ment was for Stan­dard Five pupils in prepa­ra­tion for the 2013 SEA cre­ative writ­ing test. The next prac­tice test is sched­uled for next Jan­u­ary 31.

The con­tentious CAC has been the sub­ject of much de­bate in the ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor. On Mon­day, Na­tion­al Pri­ma­ry School's Prin­ci­pals As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Lyns­ley Doo­d­hai said prin­ci­pals had vowed not to col­lect the test pack­ages or have it ad­min­is­tered to the pupils since there was in­ad­e­quate train­ing to con­duct it.

Yes­ter­day Doo­d­hai, in a re­lease, said some prin­ci­pals were threat­ened in­to col­lect­ing the pack­ages and have the prac­tice test ad­min­is­tered. He added: "Ini­tial re­ports sug­gest some prin­ci­pals have not col­lect­ed the pack­ages for the cre­ative writ­ing prac­tice as­sess­ment. Oth­er prin­ci­pals have in­di­cat­ed they have col­lect­ed be­cause they were threat­ened and in­tim­i­dat­ed by some schools su­per­vi­sors."

Doo­d­hai's state­ment added the as­so­ci­a­tion learned in some in­stances the as­sess­ment pack­ages were left by min­istry of­fi­cials with the se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel at schools and su­per­vi­sors were man­dat­ed to vis­it schools to de­liv­er pack­ages. The re­lease al­so said "prin­ci­pals have not been af­ford­ed any train­ing and are ig­no­rant of many as­pects of the CAC."

How­ev­er, the min­istry dis­missed that in its re­lease, say­ing prin­ci­pals had been re­ceiv­ing in­for­ma­tion on CAC in dif­fer­ent ways.

The re­lease added: "There have been over 94 train­ing ses­sions since Ju­ly (and train­ing is still on­go­ing), in­clu­sive of ad­min­is­tra­tor's con­fer­ences, prin­ci­pals' fra­ter­ni­ty meet­ings, clus­ter meet­ings, face-to-face meet­ings, pre­sen­ta­tions to school boards, CAC ques­tion and-an­swer book­lets, full page ad­ver­tise­ments, tele­vi­sion and talk show ap­pear­ances and press con­fer­ences, among oth­ers,"?

It added: "130 prin­ci­pals were trained at work­shops at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) Cam­pus, Val­sayn, in Ju­ly. This in­clud­ed train­ing for mon­i­tor­ing of the CAC. An ad­min­is­tra­tor's man­u­al was al­so pro­duced and dis­sem­i­nat­ed."