NOW that the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) results are out, it is important that the top officials of the Ministry of Education sit down and analyse them with the objective of charting a way forward for better performance by our students.
From the information released by the ministry, the results overall at this year’s examination can be best described as constant compared to the previous year, but nevertheless reflect a consistent improvement over the past five years.

But a crawl from 63.39 per cent in 2016 to 63.8 per cent in 2017, counting grades one to three, cannot be enough, and it is good to know that this fact was acknowledged by Education Minister, Nicolette Henry, during the announcement of the results last week. Government year after year invests the largest sum in the national budget to education and all stakeholders naturally would want to see our students do better in their examinations.

This is just one side of the coin. Students doing well at their examinations is also dependent on parental support and it is always important for parents to play their part and take ownership of their children. Parents and teachers who made great sacrifices to see their children do well at this year’s examinations deserve high commendation, but the results overall show that there is much room for improvement and greater efforts are needed in the areas of mathematics, English and the sciences.
A 58 per cent pass rate for English (whether it is an improvement or decline in performance) when our official language is English, could hardly be good enough and requires education administrators to go back to the drawing board and identify and correct the weaknesses that are leading to failure.

In the area of mathematics, teachers with full support of the ministry, have to work harder to build on the gains made, which have been steadily improving over the years.
Though it is low, the 39 per cent pass rate recorded this year points to a steady upward climb in performance compared to the very high failure rates in the past 10 years. Mathematics aside, generally, students did well in the humanities, but the 54 per cent pass rate in social studies is worrying, since it indicates that quite a large number of students in the school system pay little interest in current affairs of their country and the region as a whole.

The results also show that much work is required to shift the focus of the education system from the humanities to the sciences. Only chemistry recorded an improvement in pass rate at this year’s examination (from 41 per cent to 47 per cent), but the bottom line is that even the improved pass rate was less than 50 per cent.
Biology saw a big drop from 76 per cent in 2016 to 61 per cent this year, while the pass rate for physics declined from 55 per cent in 2016 to 52 per cent this year. The government has done much in talking up the need for Guyana to move in the direction of science and technology to keep up with the pace of development in the 21st century and it would be great to see some concrete steps being taken in the education sector to promote this agenda.

It would be great to see the government provide special incentives to teachers in the areas of mathematics and the sciences, make more scholarships available in these areas and at lease offer free scholarships to the University of Guyana for persons interested in studying mathematics.
These, along with science and mathematics fairs and competitions will go a far way in stimulating interest in these subject areas in the school system. And whatever plan the ministry comes up with to improve students’ performance at next year’s examinations, it should include focus on the poor performing schools.