Apart from talking about it, the Government and its Prime Minister have done nothing over the past eight years to rescue and revive the collapsed education system.
In making this claim in a release on Sunday, the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ) said the Ministry of Education's recent statement on its vacation revision programme provided tangible proof of government's failure to fix the collapsed system.
On June 6, the ministry issued a statement on this year's vacation revision programme which targets 15,500 students.
Of this figure, 5,500 students will be from those who are now in Standards 4 and 5, while 10,000 will be from among the 18,889 students who sat the SEA exam in March. This target group of the programme is students who got less than 50 per cent in the SEA.
The four-week programme for these 10,000 SEA students is to better prepare them to deal with secondary school which starts in the new school term in September.
This is the second such programme organised by the ministry. The first was last year when 9,000 students were targeted, but less than 3,000 actually participated.
The MSJ release said these figures "tell the ugly truth" that in TT, the education system has failed.
If 10,000 out of 18,899 students got less than 50 per cent in the SEA , the MSJ said, this means that 53 per cent of the nation’s children failed the SEA. In 2022 it was a similar number, the MSJ said.
For those who claim that the high failure rate was due to covid and classes being held online due to schools being closed, "we cite the 2020 failure rate of 37 per cent. It cannot be that 37 per cent or 50 per cent of our children are failing at education, it is that the education system is failing them!"
The failure is not only at the level of the SEA exam, the MSJ added. At CSEC the story is the same.
The MSJ said that in 2020, 45 per cent of students did not pass the basic number of five subjects.
This does not include the number of students who entered form one but who didn’t make it to form five or who just did not sit the exams. Between 2020 and 2022, some 2,660 secondary school students “dropped out” of school, the MSJ claimed.
Between 2014-17, i.e. before covid, the number was 3,134.
[caption id="attachment_1020639" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Both Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, 2nd left, and Education Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly, right, seen in this file photo at a function earlier this year, have been slammed by the MSJ for overseeing a failed education system. -[/caption]
On Dr Rowley's recent statement about the relationship between the education system and young people getting involved in crime, MSJ leader David Abdulah said, "He has been Prime Minister for eight years, but has done nothing to change the education system to ensure that our education system enables every child and young person to attain their full human potential.
"All he does is to make statements and seek to cast blame on everyone else but his government. He, therefore, is part of the problem."
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