–  Manickchand hopes intervention improves Math grades

MINISTER of Education, Priya Manickchand, on Wednesday, noted that preliminary results for the Caribbean Examinations Council’s (CXC) Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Examination and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) will be announced on Friday.

The Minister, in a video posted to the Ministry’s Facebook page, made the revelation during which she noted that officials are looking forward to positive results this year.
To this end, she disclosed that the entire Caribbean did poorly in Mathematics in 2024, and as such, CXC is moving to implement some new programmes starting in 2026.
However, Manickchand stated that while they look forward to the implementation of those programmes, Guyana did not wait and sought to immediately implement a new intervention in 2024 after the announcement of those results.

“Guyana didn’t wait on that, we implemented a new intervention where we gave to all our children scientific calculators, graph books, all the textbooks, past papers, past papers organised by topics, geometry sets, all they needed,” she said.

This intervention also included monitoring in classrooms to ensure that the syllabus was finished, and teaching and learning were happening effectively.
In 2024, the overall pass rate for CAPE stood at 92.57 per cent, which was seen as stable since the pass rate for 2023 was 93 per cent.
For CSEC in 2024, the overall pass rate was 67.23 per cent, while it was 67.34 per cent in 2023.

Percentage decreases were seen in the two most important subject areas, namely, English Language and Mathematics. In English, there was a decline from 72 per cent to 69 per cent in the pass rate, while Mathematics recorded a pass rate of 31 per cent.

At that time, Manickchand noted that a teachers’ strike occurred at one of the most crucial times in the children’s preparation for those examinations.
She had said that, while Guyana dropped in Mathematics by three percentage points, the Caribbean, overall, dropped by seven.

She indicated that the ministry was set to roll out an aggressive Mathematics intervention to ascertain where the problem lies, and work along with schools, while also ensuring that students are provided with all the necessary equipment and tools.

She said that they had looked at schools that have been recording lower grades in Mathematics, and, with that, will launch monitoring in some 50 of those schools to ensure that teachers are teaching topics, and students are understanding them.