Ministry defends Pathways roll-out
Principals deny audit claim, call for more targeted approach
Published:Thursday | November 11, 2021 | 12:13 AMTameka Gordon/Senior Staff Reporter
Despite claims by the National Parent-Teacher Association of Jamaica that there has been no recent consultation on the controversial Sixth Form Pathways Programme (SFPP), the Ministry of Education has insisted that sensitisation sessions have been conducted by schools.
“We have been having a series [of discussions] ... . I can’t say that we have engaged all our parents, but we have what we call ongoing discussions with key stakeholders, who sit at our table, and we have been speaking with those persons concerning the roll-out of this initiative,” acting Chief Education Officer Dr Kasan Troupe said in response to Gleaner queries at a post-Cabinet press briefing on Wednesday.
The ministry has also hosted town halls, she said.
Yesterday, Troupe also said that the ministry has grounded its SFPP decisions on audits of public high schools and the private institutions that will absorb the students that the government schools cannot accommodate.
“We have conducted our space audits in the high school, and we also extended that to our tertiary institutions, and that is why we were able to come up with the idea of the off-site opportunities for our boys and girls,” Troupe said yesterday, even as she assured principals that the ministry would be working with them to address space limitations through partnerships with 10 public and 24 private tertiary institutions.
However, president of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools, Linvern Wright, is contending that the ministry has not conducted any such audit of schools to determine whether schools had the space or resources to run the now compulsory programme.
“We feel that an audit of the spaces in high schools should have been done so [that] if we are going to increase the numbers we have at sixth form, we know how we are going to accommodate those students. The lack of that audit has taken us by surprise,” Wright told The Gleaner.
He noted as an example a lack of equipment in some schools to accommodate the students under Pathway Three of the initiative, who will be exposed to industrial and skills-based courses.
“To deal with the Pathway Three students, who are the ones who have really not [left grade 11] with much [qualifications], we would need to do some real technical and vocational education. That is an expensive venture that many schools, even with the normal first to fifth form, do not have the equipment to undertake,” he said.
He suggested that the ministry take a targeted look at schools that are resourced in particular areas and are able to offer specialised programmes, “but don’t force traditional high schools to change and do things that they might not be able to do, given their resources”.
One Clarendon principal was still uneasy when The Gleaner sought a reaction to Troupe’s statements yesterday.
“If you are advancing the programme and we still have not had a meeting with those partners, when are we going to meet them?” asked the principal, who did not wish to be named.
The SFPP is being pitched to bolster the educational attainment and occupational readiness of students by integrating the Career Advancement Programme and the occupational associate degrees into the sixth-form programme.