Latest update March 31st, 2026 12:12 AM
Re-examination of Grades Two and Four Assessments on Ministry’s agenda
The Ministry of Education is currently embracing a course of action that will see it seeking to re-examine the Grades Two and Four Assessments. This strategic move, according to Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, is intended to ascertain whether the Assessments are being utilised to give the value that they were initially meant to give.
Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, and other senior education officials interacts with pupils.
The Minister, who was at the time speaking to a gathering of education stakeholders at the St Agnes Primary School recently, reflected on why the Assessments were introduced in the first place.
She recalled that while the former examinations used to place children at the secondary level was the Secondary School Entrance Examination (SSEE), and then the Common Entrance examination before it changed to the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) two other Assessments – Grade Two and Four Assessments – were introduced as diagnostic tools.
“Why was that? This was because we found that when children reached to Grade Six that’s when you learnt whether they known anything or not on a national scale…if they didn’t know anything, they learnt it there,” the Minister noted.
Moreover, in order to ensure that the needful learning process was engaged at an earlier level the two diagnostic Assessments were introduced.
With these two in place, the Minister explained that schools were in a better position to determine at an early stage the areas in which pupils were weak that needed to be addressed ahead of them sitting the NGSA.
But according to the Minister, the intent was not to only thrust this task on the schools alone but also to involve the support of parents in getting their children to the level they needed to be in preparation for the subsequent Grades. “The idea was to work on the weaknesses and developing the strengths so that they don’t have those same weaknesses when they reach Grade Four,” informed the Minister.
And the Assessment at the Grade Four level, she noted, is one that was designed to establish if the weaknesses detected at the Grade Two level were addressed.
But according to Minister Manickchand, her Ministry has now found the need to re-examine the two Assessments to determine whether they have been working the way they were intended.
“We have to re-examine whether those Assessments have worked. We can’t re-examine them by ourselves; we need our teachers to be frank with us…whether the data coming back from those Assessments have been used to inform the teachers in the classroom about their next steps…that is going to be under serious examination in the primary sector,” asserted the Education Minister.
Although the Minister did not precisely highlight what triggered the need for the re-examination, she said that the Ministry is on a course of ensuring that there is efficient monitoring in the school system.
“We have to make sure that we are monitoring and measuring and that is going to be a huge part of what you will see happening in the Ministry from our end, and we hope that teachers will be fully on board with us…,” said the very vocal Education Minister.
“It is not holding a big stick over anybody but if we are just going to teach everyday…everyday teachers come in and teach their hearts out, and you don’t measure frequently what that teaching is doing then we wouldn’t know where there are gaps and what needs to be done to fill those gap,” she added.
The monitoring efforts, according to the Minister, will be done through specific programmes that have been created and are presently being created.
As part of the Ministry’s efforts to improve the quality of education delivered, Manickchand said that moves are apace by her Ministry to shortly roll out its revised literacy plan “so that we can make sure that all our children are literate by Grade Four.”
“We believe strongly that if we fix that issue we are going to see a much smoother flow through the other grades – Grade Five through 11,” she confidently asserted.
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