Education ministry aims for advanced literacy in underperforming schools

IN AN effort to improve literacy in the 248 underperforming schools islandwide, the Ministry of Education and Youth is targeting a five per cent increase in performance over the next three years.

Fayval Williams, minister of education and youth, made the announcement during yesterday’s post Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House.

The Government-commissioned report of the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission (JETC), chaired by Professor Orlando Patterson, which was released in January 2022, stated that most students at the primary level were barely literate.

According to the JETC, the 2019 Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exam revealed that 33 per cent of students cannot read or can barely do so; 56 per cent of students cannot, or can barely write; and 58 per cent of students cannot, or can barely find information on a topic.

“We want to increase and maintain the literacy rate at Grade Four by 2026, and, just to give you a sense of where we were in 2019, we achieved literacy rates of 83 per cent at the grade-four level, but the grade-four test that we generally do was not administered in 2020 or 2021, because of COVID,” Williams said.

“In 2022, we saw the impact, the negative impact of COVID on literacy, and so we’re back on track for 2023. The grade-four test was administered and we expect the results by November 17,” she said.

She said the target is to get to 80 per cent this year, 85 per cent for 2024-2025, and 90 per cent for 2025-2026.

“We are going to do this by targeting 126 primary schools and 56 secondary schools. These are the ones that got an unsatisfactory rating on certain key performance indicators, and we looked at their four such indicators: teaching in support for learning, students’ academic performance, students’ academic progress in the curriculum, and enhancement programmes that are in the particular schools,” Williams said.

She said, under the schools’ improvement framework, all 248 underperforming schools will be supported to get Jamaica’s literacy rates up, and there are pilot literacy programmes in schools such as the Literacy Education Acceleration Programme (LEAP) in which six schools were selected from regions one and four to bridge the gaps in literacy.

Williams said she was “quite impressed” with the results from LEAP.

The minister also said that the creative language-based Learning Foundation’s Programme is being piloted and good results are showing.