-Minister Manickchand says

WHILE a marginal increase was recorded in Mathematics at this year’s National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA), the Ministry of Education will, in September, begin the roll out of a Mathematics intervention to bring improvements at the primary and secondary levels.

This was disclosed by Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, during the release of the NGSA results last week, where she noted that, while the improvement recorded this year is good, more must be done to ensure there is sustained improvement.

According to Minister Manickchand, the ministry will launch an entire Mathematics intervention aimed at seeing sustained improvement in the subject area for primary and secondary schools.

“You are going to see us launch an entire maths intervention that’s aimed at seeing better results which really means we will have more children matriculating and being able to enter tertiary [institutions] as well as the workforce,” she said.

To this end, she stated that the intervention will happen as soon as September for the new school term with the resources for this being placed in the hands of the learners even before then.

As part of this, Minister Manickchand said that it will include the training and retraining of teachers, the provision of resources like textbooks and other things along with monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of the programme.

In May, the minister had told members of the media at a press conference that there will be some curriculum changes beginning in September. She had noted, too, that the production of material by the literacy unit had already started.

The minister used that opportunity to inform that the implementation of the math intervention will include provision of all textbooks, scientific calculators, geometry sets, graph books, past papers and the improved and robust training and retraining of the people teaching the subject.