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St Vincent Introduces Universal Secondary Education

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 September 2005, 15:00 CDT

Text of report by Caribbean Media Corporation news agency website on 6 September

Kingstown, St Vincent: The St Vincent and the Grenadines government has introduced universal secondary education here, but Opposition Leader Arnhim Eustace said students were being put into a system without much regard for their own future.

Education officials Tuesday [6 September] confirmed that all students who wrote the Common Entrance Examination (CEE) having been placed in a secondary school.

Chief Education Officer Susan Dougan said last week that 3,161 students had written the exams and all had been placed in a secondary school.

The ruling wrote the CEE and 3175 students had been placed within secondary schools.

The officials said that of the 700 students, who wrote the School Leaving Examination, (SLE) 481 were placed within secondary schools and multi-purpose centres across the country.

The SLE, which became redundant this year, provided students who had failed the CEE with another opportunity of attending secondary schools after a two-year period at the "senior" level within the primary school.

Dougan said that the Ministry of Education would not phase out the CEE since it would be used to analyse students' ability.

"We are not going to phase out the common entrance exams because we need to maintain a system, for now anyway, where our students will have some sort of guideline in terms of a benchmark," she said.

"The common entrance for us then would be not a diagnostic examination but an examination that will give us an idea of where the children should be placed."

The ruling United labour Party (ULP) in a campaign mode for the next general election here, described the free secondary education project as an "education revolution".

But Eustace, speaking on his party's radio programme, said he was concerned that some students have been placed at secondary schools without the necessary preparation.

"I don't know what goal that is. Because I am concerned about the number of persons who have been pushed into the system, who do not have the necessary background to continue in that system unless you have a lot of remedial work. And I do not believe that remedial work for one month can correct the deficiencies of six or seven years."

Source: BBC Monitoring Americas

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