Education Minister pleads with parents to send their children to school tomorrow

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Education Minister pleads with parents to send their children to school tomorrow

Education Minister, Nyan Gadsby-Dolly is appealing with parents of students in Forms 1 to 3 to “Send your children to school tomorrow!

Speaking at the People’s National Movement (PNM) meeting at the San Juan Laventille Composite Secondary School on Saturday, Gadsby-Dolly said while they could not provide any guarantees to parents to assuage their fears regarding their children’s health, they can rest assured that every possible effort has been made to ensure the physical safety of students as they return to physical schooling.

After two years of online school due to the pandemic, the minister said it was critical that students returned now and questioned their role as future leaders.
She asked: “What happens in 15 years? What happens in 20 years? Where do we get the cadre of our leaders from? Will they be properly prepared for what responsibility they will have to shoulder at that time?”

Gadsby-Dolly said, “For each child that is performing well online in the academic sense, there are a plethora of other children who are not.”

She shared standardised test results for the SEA, CAPE and CSEC and explained just how these scores showed the adverse impact that being out of school was having on some students.

The minister revealed that in 2021, 47 per cent of the students that wrote CSEC in T&T got their full certificate, which included Math and English Language. Gadsby-Dolly stated, “That 47 per cent has been the lowest in five years in T&T.”

At the SEA in 2021, she said “More children scored less than the pass mark in SEA,” Six per cent more children scored less than 30 per cent; while nine per cent more children scored less than 50 per cent. Only two per cent more children scored greater than 90 per cent.

Declaring, “We had many more children doing worse than they did in 2020,” the minister said 48 per cent of students were scoring less than 50 per cent in SEA, which meant that 50 per cent of secondary schools were receiving more than 75 per cent of children who did not pass SEA.

Gadsby-Dolly said, “What the pandemic did was exacerbate what was already a critical situation.”

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