To the 19,079 pupils who wrote the Secondary Entrance Assessment examination this year, we are proud of each one of you.
Under normal conditions, the SEA, like its predecessor Common Entrance, is a stressful examination. There is no denying that.
However, the conditions this time around have been anything but normal.
The pupils who wrote SEA 2022 would have been engaged in online learning for the majority of the last two years, after physical schooling was halted when they were in the second term of Standard Three because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Standard Three is usually the time when pupils start to seriously settle down to focus on the SEA exam. So, it is no surprise that there was a drastic drop in the performances compared to other years.
According to Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly, over 9,000 pupils scored less than 50 per cent and will have to undertake remedial schooling during the vacation so they will be better prepared to enter secondary school.
These statistics tell a scary story.
Realistically, this means these children are not adequately prepared for the secondary school system.
This failing, however, is society’s, not the children.
The children writing this year’s exam were only allowed to re-enter physical school on February 7. The SEA exam came eight weeks later on March 31.
The results of the 2021 SEA examination, when compared with those of 2020, showed decreases in performance consistent with learning loss, attributed directly to the absence of pupils from physical classrooms during the pandemic.
The results of the diagnostic tests in Math and English Language, which all public schools administered in October 2021, also identified gaps in pupil achievement across levels in these fundamental areas.
More alarming is that close to 2,000 pupils, or 10.3 per cent of those who wrote the exam, have to resit the examination next year. Last year, the number who had to resit the examination was just over 1,100, while in 2020, just over 500 were told they had to resit. This means the number of pupils who have to resit the exams has increased by 300 per cent over the last two years.
But the Ministry of Education did have some silver linings with respect to this year’s SEA.
This year, we do not have the top three performers being named, a process which has become traumatic for the pupils, and parents/guardians were also able to access the results online instead of having to go through the nerve-wracking process in front of an entire school. However, they still had to go to schools to get a hard copy of the results to register their children in their new secondary schools. Minister Gadsby-Dolly has promised the entire process will be done electronically next year.
More significantly, however, we hope the four-week Vacation Revision programme, which is expected to cost $10 million, will truly provide a solution to help those 9,000 pupils who scored under 50 per cent in this year’s exam. Minister Gadsby-Dolly says the programme requires 600 teachers from the primary and secondary school system. Hopefully, this can be achieved with little resistance and all the stakeholders, including parents/guardians, teachers, representative bodies and most importantly, the pupils, will take advantage of this opportunity.