An­na-Lisa Paul

There will be no Na­tion­al Test in 2017.

Hun­dreds of par­ents and pupils yes­ter­day breathed a sigh of re­lief as chief ed­u­ca­tion of­fi­cer in the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Har­ri­lal Seecha­ran, said, "We have tak­en the de­ci­sion in the min­istry to not go ahead with the Na­tion­al Test in 2017."

An­nounc­ing the de­ci­sion dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Seecha­ran said the de­ci­sion was based on con­cerns from a num­ber of stake­hold­ers.

The de­ci­sion arose dur­ing the na­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion con­sul­ta­tions which took place in Feb­ru­ary, fol­low­ing which the rec­om­men­da­tions were pre­sent­ed to and lat­er ac­cept­ed by the Cab­i­net.

Seecha­ran ex­plained: "What we are cur­rent­ly do­ing is re­view­ing the Na­tion­al Test to place by plac­ing greater em­pha­sis on an as­sess­ment for learn­ing.

"It no longer will have that role of com­par­ing schools and com­par­ing stu­dents, but we will fo­cus on us­ing the da­ta to im­prove teach­ing and learn­ing."

It was usu­al­ly ad­min­is­tered at the end of the school year, to all Stan­dard One and Stan­dard Three stu­dents at­tend­ing pub­lic and pri­vate pri­ma­ry schools.

The Na­tion­al Test was an an­nu­al stan­dard­ised ex­am­i­na­tion cov­er­ing the sub­jects of Lan­guage Arts, Math­e­mat­ics, Sci­ence and So­cial Stud­ies.

The ob­jec­tives in­clud­ed gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion for de­ci­sion-mak­ing at the school, dis­trict and na­tion­al lev­els; iden­ti­fy­ing ar­eas of the sys­tem that re­quire fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tion; iden­ti­fy­ing na­tion­al norms; com­par­ing stu­dents' per­for­mance by school and ed­u­ca­tion­al dis­tricts; and track­ing stu­dents' progress through school.

Hav­ing al­ready scrapped the Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment Com­po­nent (CAC) and re­vert­ed to the orig­i­nal for­mat at the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am in which stu­dents are on­ly test­ed in the ar­eas of Maths, Lan­guage Arts and Cre­ative Writ­ing, Seecha­ran said dis­cus­sions had al­so cen­tered around re­mov­ing School-Based As­sess­ments (SBA's) at the CAPE Units 1 and 2.

In­di­cat­ing the min­istry's fail­ure to act in this area, he said it had to be a re­gion­al de­ci­sion and was not up to them to de­cide on its re­moval.

Seecha­ran al­so as­sured the min­istry was work­ing on en­sur­ing the seam­less tran­si­tion be­tween Ear­ly Child­hood Care and Ed­u­ca­tion (EC­CE) and the pri­ma­ry lev­el, and had em­barked on im­ple­ment­ing a qual­i­ty as­sur­ance sys­tem in this re­gard.

He added the min­istry was de­vel­op­ing a pol­i­cy to guide ICT im­ple­men­ta­tion in schools, which would soon be com­plet­ed and pre­sent­ed to the min­istry's strate­gic ex­ec­u­tive team.

Hav­ing been giv­en the go-ahead by Cab­i­net to pro­cure lap­tops for stu­dents, Seecha­ran said they were in the process of prepar­ing ten­der doc­u­ments and were now await­ing the re­lease of funds to move the process along.