Keara Gardier of the St Martin Primary School is this year’s top scholar at the 2019 Grade Six National Assessment.
The Ministry of Education announced at a press briefing on Thursday that Keara Gardier, Shantay Avril of the Ebenizer Seventh Day Adventist (SDA), Khobie Darroux and Kamal Peter of the Convent Preparatory and Jenay Lawrence of the St Martin Primary School were the top performers in this year’s examinations.
Commenting on the performance of students, Education Officer Robert Guiste stated, “While there has been a slight drop in the performance of students, the decline is not significant. In fact, the 2019 mean in Language Arts and Maths are 38.31 and 36.78 respectively as compared to 38.2 and 37.2 in 2018. There was a less than 2% drop in students’ performance in Science and Social Sciences.”
He added, “Girls continue to outperform boys, although, in some areas, that gap is closing. The Western District continues to outperform the other districts.”
Education Minister Petter St. Jean commended the students for their performance and identified some areas that needed to be addressed.
“We must address urgently, the teaching and learning of Mathematics and English and improve our boys’ attitudes to, and confidence in, reading and writing. Clearly, our boys remain at risk and I want to make this special appeal to call on parents and the wider community to provide more support and encouragement to our boys.”
Meantime, the Pioneer Preparatory School topped the list of most outstanding schools in this year’s examination.
The official results summary is posted below.
While not wishing to demean those who have excelled in this type of testing, I nevertheless maintain that grooming children at this early age for an unnecessary examination ranks as a form of child abuse. I have given my reasons in previous DNO commentaries, namely: Life Beyond the Common Entrance; My School Report and Putting Art in Schools.
The very wording of this announcement and the subsequent analysis says it all: performers; outperform; score; etc. Readers might be tempted to think that they are reading a horse racing betting form card, rather than a sensitive understanding of the ability of children at their most formative age. Creativity is totally absent from the equation.
Congratulations to all the students especially the top performers. Way to go Convent Prep.
We need a change in the school hours. School should be from 7am to 4pm or 5pm.Students have too much free time in which they are left unsupervised after school and as a result a lot of them get into activities which they shouldn’t be part of.