Head of the National Primary Schools Principals Association (NAPSPA), Lance Mottley, said his association is happy that the Ministry of Education took its recommendations and decided to hold the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) in the third term of 2021.
Speaking to Power 102fm this morning, Mottley said that NAPSPA has been very much involved with respect to making recommendations for the SEA.
In fact, he said that from very early on in the pandemic “We would have presented a number of proposals to the Ministry of Education, as it relates to the reopening of schools, whenever that might be, the curriculum, as well as when we felt SEA should have been done.”
“We are happy that the Ministry would have taken into consideration our recommendations in all of those regards.”
Mottley said “We recommended that the SEA be shifted to the third term because we knew the pandemic would continue to affect the population of the children for the SEA for 2021 and 2022 and possibly 2023.” He said they were actually hoping for the end of the third term, but they accept that there are logistical issues where that is concerned.
With respect to the physical reopening of school in the new term, Mottley is not seeing that happening.
He said “We are still trying to determine how physical reopening is going to work, even with a blended learning environment, because we have so many different kinds of schools.”
He said while the reopening may work for very small schools in terms of physical and social distancing, it’s not going to work for the medium to large schools.
Mottley said with blended learning “there’s also the whole issue of supervision of our students, because parents are by and large back out to work”, so who is going to monitor those children who are at home for a few days a week, while another batch has to be in the classroom.
He said while it may be a parent issue, it is also a very important issue for them, as they want to ensure students are safe and are also able to complete the tasks given to them.
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