The Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment Ex­am­i­na­tion (SEA) will take place on April 2 this year and ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion, there are no plans, just yet, to abol­ish the ex­am.

Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia made the an­nounce­ment on Tues­day dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry’s head of­fice.

The ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter said the ex­am will be writ­ten by 19,363 stu­dents, the largest num­ber in the past ten years.

Gar­cia said of those who are writ­ing the ex­am 9,772 stu­dents are boys, while 9,551 are girls.

How­ev­er, the ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter said while the Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter an­nounced her gov­ern­ment’s in­ten­tion to abol­ish the Com­mon En­trance ex­am and em­bark on sub­stan­tial ed­u­ca­tion­al re­form in this new decade, the same can­not be done in this coun­try, just yet.

In an ad­dress to the na­tion, Prime Min­is­ter of Bar­ba­dos Mia Mot­t­ley said, “Ten or eleven years old is too young to ask a child to de­ter­mine what their life should look like for the rest of their life. In so do­ing, we will have to de­ter­mine whether we lit­er­al­ly ex­pand pri­ma­ry ed­u­ca­tion, cre­ate mid­dle schools that every, sin­gle sec­ondary school that will take chil­dren will be schools of ex­cel­lence.”

Min­is­ter Gar­cia ad­mit­ted though for some time now his min­istry has been look­ing for an al­ter­na­tive method for tran­si­tion­ing stu­dents from pri­ma­ry school to sec­ondary school.

But he added of­fi­cials are yet to come up with a for­mu­la that will al­low the tran­si­tion of stu­dents from pri­ma­ry to sec­ondary school with­out hav­ing any prob­lems with the church and al­so with re­spect to the right of the par­ents to choose.

The ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter al­so ex­plained what the SEA will be fo­cused on this year.

“It is im­por­tant for all of us to un­der­stand that this ex­am will fo­cus to a large ex­tent on cre­ative writ­ing, crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing skills. Last year there was a gen­er­al furore by some par­ents be­cause it was re­port­ed that some of the chil­dren were not able to deal with some of the ques­tions that they were asked to write. Re­mem­ber that the cur­ricu­lum at the pri­ma­ry lev­el has been so de­signed to en­sure that our stu­dents en­gage in crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing not on­ly re­gur­gi­ta­tion.”

Mean­while, the chief ed­u­ca­tion of­fi­cer Har­ri­lal Seecha­ran said al­most 7,000 par­ents have re­quest­ed that their chil­dren’s names and re­sults not be pub­lished af­ter the ex­am.

He said the ed­u­ca­tion min­istry will con­tin­ue with the pol­i­cy im­ple­ment­ed in 2019, where par­ents can re­quest to have their chil­dren’s names and re­sults with­held from pub­li­ca­tion. Seecha­ran said so far out of the 19,363 stu­dents who will be writ­ing the ex­am, 6,751 par­ents have ap­plied for their chil­dren’s names not to be pub­lished. This fig­ure rep­re­sents just about one-third of the stu­dents writ­ing the ex­am.