Ministry of Education reviewing USE
Education Minister, Arsen James supports a call to review the Caribbean’s education system, to better address the needs of students.
The call was made recently by the Director of Social Development in the OECS, James Fletcher, while speaking at a UNICEF mid-term review meeting in St Kitts.
Mr. Fletcher stated that the high incidence of dropouts and increasing repetition rates is a cause for concern.
The education minister says though this is not currently the case in St. Lucia, it is not farfetched, given the Universal Education system recently implemented on the island.
“Normally you would find there would be drop outs in schools, it’s a normal thing and you find that especially at the secondary school level, especially with the economic situation and the Universal Secondary education…” the minister said.
He alluded to a case where one student scored 9 per cent last year and this year another who scored 3 per cent.
“If special arrangements are not made for these students and they continue into secondary school without giving them special remedial attention, chances are they will drop out because they will not be able to do the CXC exams”, the minister explained.
Mr. James said the Ministry has actually started reviewing the education and is putting measures in place to address the eventuality.
“We are ensuring that we have TVET (Educational Vocational Education Training) in schools, and we have a combination of subjects, we bringing in specialist teachers to help students with special needs, we have counselors in schools, we’ve also introduced visual arts, music…these are things we are now working on because of the advent of Universal Secondary Education, because we realize not every child is academically inclined so we have to make school such that every child benefits,” the minister said.
Universal Secondary Education was introduced in St. Lucia in 2006.