Ministry of Education urged to scrap policy of denying parents financial assistance for children writing CSEC examinations

Oct 31, 2023 Letters

Dear Editor,

I visited my son’s school, Westminster Secondary, recently to enquire about payments for his CSEC exams and submit information for financial assistance. In passing, the senior teacher I was speaking with explained that if subject teachers do not recommend the child, they can still sit the examination for the subject, but the parent has to pay the full fee, thus not being able to benefit from financial assistance for whichever subjects the child was not recommended.

She advised that this was the ‘rule,’ the policy of the Ministry of Education. While I have not been able to verify this beyond the Principal of the school itself, it is easy to imagine that this was a policy reflective of inflicting punishment on errant parents for not attending more closely to the educational needs of their children.

Such a policy however, as much as it may seem to have been lifted from some textbook philosophy of encouraging and chastising parents regarding the educational needs of their children, has not had the benefit of a larger perspective on the socio-economic dynamics of our society, that with poverty rates which continue to rise even in recent years, many parents are hard pressed to feed and properly clothe their children for school, much less spend time they do not have tending to their children’s homework and assignments as a financially capable family would.

Many children come from what I consider dysfunctional homes, often run by single women, with their fathers caught up in the Matrix of life in Guyana. It goes without saying these hard working moms do not have the time of their counterparts in normal families to attend the needs of their children. Regardless of their appearance also, nutritionally deficient children will very likely have varying degrees of difficulty learning, and hard-pressed teachers who often feel that they are being denied fair financial compensation in the form of appropriate salaries, very often take the easy road of not spending enough time on these children, a situation exacerbated by large class sizes, the percentages relative to the class of which rise significantly in the lower tier schools. The home environment of some children also impact negatively on their behavior patterns, generating anti-social behaviors which become a challenge for teachers, schools as well as parents.

The dire conditions arising from these drastic instances of poverty, which hit above 40% recently, were only exacerbated in the extreme with the spate of COVID-19 which lasted from around April 2020 to January 2022, I think it was. With unemployment among the poor rising astronomically among many middle- and lower income families due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the lives of families, parents and children, were completely upended with respect to functioning as they would, much less with acquiring laptops and internet service to ensure their children were able to attend classes. COVID-19 conditions were so dire globally that even the Caribbean Examinations Council adjusted its timetable for these examinations and adopted multiple choice-based examinations in recognition of the challenges faced by the Caribbean’s children.

COVID-19 lockdowns affected all children of school age where their education was concerned, so while the lockdowns may have ended in 2022, children are still coming through the system with truncated levels of education which require much remedial attention and immensely more work by teachers to bring these children up to exam readiness. I wish to therefore ask the Ministry of Education to permanently scrap this rule/policy of unfairly penalizing parents by denying financial assistance when their children are unprepared for examinations, circumstances which unfortunately result from government’s larger economic policy framework, the numerous challenges faced by teachers and students, and the unmitigated impact on students as a consequence of COVID-19. Parents whose children’s schools advise them similarly are also encouraged to make their voices heard at the ministry.

Regards,

Craig Sylvester

Craig Sylvester, CSEC, financial, Ministry of Education, writing

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