No time for failure

• Poor-performing schools placed in firing line

Carl Gilchrist, Gleaner Writer

With less than four weeks to go before the start of the new school year, Education Minister Andrew Holness is warning principals that he will not tolerate failing schools in the education system.

Addressing the Ministry of Education's Region Six Back-to-School Conference for board chairpersons and principals, held yesterday at the Gran Bahía Principe in St Ann, Holness said he was not prepared to allow such schools to continue in the system.

"One thing is clear: there are several schools where the leadership is failing. Whenever leadership fails in a school, you are guaranteed that all other systems will fail," the education minister said.

"As educators, we have to have a one-on-one conversation with ourselves: Is it fair that a student's life opportunity, a student's chance of being successful, is it fair that he is held hostage to the business of internal industrial relations - who does not like who; who is not talking to who; who feels threatened by someone; not giving this one an appointment because that one is coming for my job?"

Leadership critical

Holness added: "I am not prepared to allow those things to continue while our students suffer. When everything in the society is breaking down, the school must not break down. Schools are the main socialising arm of the state. When the home fails, the school must not fail. I'm not prepared to allow that."

Holness said for several years many students have been allowed to leave high schools illiterate.

He said a school inspectorate to be implemented by the ministry would be collecting objective information on schools that would help determine the performance of each institution.

"Going forward, when the inspectorate is fully operational, when it has collected the baseline data on all schools, we are going to be confronted with the question, 'what do we do with failing schools'?"

New regulations needed

He said the law has to be changed to allow the ministry to intervene in failing schools. Currently, he said, school boards do not take directives from the ministry. All the ministry can do, he explained, is present the law and the policy and allow the board to operate. But, he said, when schools fail, it is the ministry that shoulders the blame.

Holness also warned that the practice of using public funds for private purposes must end. The minister put school boards on alert, saying that schools' accounts will be audited and, where there are breaches, they would be dealt with within the law.

Representatives from the nearly 300 schools in Region Six, made up of St Catherine and Clarendon, attended the two-day conference to prepare for the new academic year.

At the meeting, Jamaica Energy Partners presented scholarship funding to several students who were recently successful in the Grade Six Achievement Test.

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