Revised Automatic Promotion Policy for new school year – Education Minister

Jul 05, 2013 News

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By Sharmain Grainger
Following several informative stakeholders’ fora, the Ministry of Education has made a decision to revise its Automatic Promotion Policy, which takes into consideration not only subjects students are good at, but also subjects that are required for their matriculation.
In fact, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand at a workshop held yesterday at  the National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD) disclosed that “the parents, teachers and even the students themselves believe that promotion from one grade to another should not be automatic but earned.”
Moreover, a revised version of the policy was crafted and will be brought into effect from the new school year which will commence in September.

According to Minister Manickchand, the policy will now require that students who score below the overall pass mark set by the school, in more than 50 per cent of the subjects being undertaken, repeat the grade. Also, if students achieve less than the overall pass mark set by the school, with the scores for the subject areas of Mathematics and English being unacceptable, they will be asked to repeat the grade.
But, according to the Education Minister, if a student fails to attain the overall pass mark as a result of any other subject, that student will not be asked to repeat the grade, but may, however, be required to drop the subject he or she failed.
According to Manickchand, the aim of the new policy is to help students succeed at both English and Mathematics since all students need at least five Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) subjects, at one sitting, including English A and Mathematics at Grades One to Three, to matriculate.
She explained further that statistics show that although many schools attain 100 per cent passes in a variety of CSEC subjects, the matriculation rate is not satisfactory because of the poor pass rates in English and Mathematics.
“A student who masters English and Mathematics can thereof choose any other three subjects, based on his/her career path preference,” the Minister asserted.
The Education System, she explained, currently uses a spiral curriculum which means that to a large extent the topics across grades are the same. However, she noted that the scope increases from one grade to another, therefore making it imperative for students to master the curriculum content and skills of the previous grade in order to prepare for a higher level.
As such, Minister Manickchand said that all students would be instructed in a manner that would make it more likely for them to achieve pass marks. Added to this, she disclosed that focus will be given specifically to the listing of a school, the delivery of the curriculum, and the setting of and compliance with timetables, among other factors.
In the past, students who failed to achieve the overall pass mark set by the school were made to repeat the grade and by extension, all the subjects, including those at which the student may have done exceptionally well. This, as a result, led to repeaters dropping-out of school either through boredom of having to redo subject matter they would have already mastered or through embarrassment of having to be in the same class with much younger students.
It was for this reason that the Automatic Promotion Policy was initially introduced under the tenure of former Minister of Education, Shaik Baksh, to correct the negative effects of Grade Repetition.
However, the policy, which applies only to secondary schools, was designed to not only automatically promote, but to ensure that students were furnished with intense remediation. But according to Minister Manickchand “for a whole host of reasons this was not happening…so we could deduce from that the students who would have been automatically promoted may not have been as successful as if they were forced to master a subject.”
No formal analysis was undertaken by the Education Ministry to ascertain the performance of automatically-promoted students at CSEC, Minister Manickchand admitted yesterday.
She said with that policy in place, students were promoted to the next grade, regardless of their performance following the annual assessments.
But after the completion of a promised review of the policy, complete with reports from some 30 consultation sessions across Guyana, it was revealed that the policy was not popular with any of the critical stakeholders.
But although the policy was found to be flawed, Chief Education Officer Olato Sam insisted that the programme in its original form had positive results, including the fact that students’ drop-out rate had noticeably declined. He pointed to the fact that with the automatic promotion, students were given the opportunity to focus on the subject areas they were good at, without being penalised for the subject areas which they failed.

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