Students are being used as ‘guinea pigs’, says Phillips

Leader of the Opposition, Dr Peter Phillips, says that the education system needs to be overhauled to ensure that students at all levels are exposed to the best opportunities to excel.

Speaking at a fundraising event in North Central Clarendon on the weekend, Phillips said from the early childhood through to tertiary levels, every Jamaican child must be provided with full access to a good education.

He said it is clear that the Ministry of Education does not know what it is doing, and this shows up very clearly in relation to the Primary Exit Profile introduced to replace the Grade Six Achievement Test.

"Parents rightly feel that their children are being used as guinea pigs in a programme that has been inadequately prepared, which condemns them to failure from the start," Phillips said.

"Of the 37,500 students who sat the mock examinations in June, only 583 (one and a half per cent) were deemed by the examiners to have mastered the subjects to the requirement of PEP."

Describing the secondary education system as a virtual apartheid that discriminates against the majority, the opposition leader said there is one learning environment for the traditional high schools and those students' average pass rate is five subjects.

VULNERABLE TO LIFE OF CRIME

But, he noted, "in the non-traditional schools, which the majority attend, it is a totally different learning environment and those students only average two subjects. Worse, thousands of students attend schools for more than four years without passing a single subject and are left totally unprepared for the world of work or for further study. These young Jamaicans are at risk and vulnerable to a life of crime."

Phillips promised that the next People's National Party (PNP) Government will establish the same learning environment in all secondary schools islandwide, so that all students will have equitable access to quality education.

Regarding the recent announcement that some 800 new students of the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, were facing deregistration for failing to pay their tuition fees, the opposition leader said the next PNP Government would ensure that tertiary education is affordable.

"Under the next PNP government, we will ensure that the repayment of student loans only begins when the student is employed and it is capped to a percentage of income," Phillips told his audience.

He said parents at all levels are already burdened with the massive increases in the cost of living, which came with the $31-billion tax package last year and can hardly cope with the price of educating their children.