Why should 30% of our children face failure?

Reforming the Education System

Opinion

By Jan Arden

Two weeks ago, we commented here on the energetic approach of the new Minister of Education and Human Resources, Mahend Gungapersad, as the widest possible consultations were held with all stakeholders to address both the immediacy of a successful « rentrée scolaire » and to consider viable alternatives to the calamitous story of the Extended Stream left behind by his predecessor and her advisors. There was little time to waste on either front as the 13th of January loomed ever larger.

In a wide-ranging press conference held Monday last, the Minister, surrounded by his top IVTB House cadres, addressed head-on the proposals those consultations have led him to regarding the abolition of the Extended Stream and transitional arrangements for the thousands of our children trapped in that dead-end. We learn that private and public partners and state institutions like the MIE, the MES, the MQA, the MITD and others joined hands to propose a replacement of the Extended stream by a new three-year Foundational Course based on three pedagogic pillars leading to a competency validation certificate rather than the National Certificate of Education (NCE) and one that can be used seamlessly for admission to the MITD. The outline of the curricular activities is sufficiently advanced, it seems, for the MIE and MITD to work jointly on the necessary retraining of those educators who will be called upon to entrench that new pathway as from January 2025.

For years, we have railed — both here and elsewhere — like other voices in the desert, unheard by an establishment that seemed oblivious to the ongoing disaster of the Extended Stream. This establishment appeared comfortable with its obsession with an elitist and competitive philosophy, the unnecessary burden of the added NCE, and the pompous irritants of Academies. To top it all, there was the exclusive fiat requiring five credits to pursue college studies.

Now, however, the exclusion of adolescents from ever pursuing their A-levels or HSC due to the 5-credit requirement is a thing of the past, and the abomination of the Extended Stream will also be abolished starting from the 2025 intake. It is no mean achievement to have brought our best educational brains, their cumulative experience and, more or less the same Education establishment and cadres to sketch within 2-3 weeks a new era for our children and the country. If the same spirit of consultation and dialogue governs the Assises for Education  announced for the April break, the Minister and his key cadres can prepare to go beyond those first steps and develop a more resilient and equitable education system geared to our country’s needs by providing multiple personal development and skilling avenues for the non-academically oriented while ensuring better quality education for those in the academic stream. Two issues in particular should retain the attention of our body of well-intentioned pedagogues, administrators and teachers as the April horizon approaches:

* Do we need the National Certificate of Education (NCE)?

At a time when pupil cohorts are regularly dwindling, causing foreclosure of several private schools, what was the necessity of another competitive exam at Grade Nine (the NCE, which has been the object of many criticisms) and the corollary discrimination between « normal » regional high schools and the restricted-access twelve Academies for higher grades. Has there been any assessment undertaken of the overall benefits, of the impact of another change of venue (after Primary School Achievement Certificate – PSAC) on the selected children’s lives and studies or of the demoralisation of those regional schools bereft of their brighter role-models?

If we had the resources twenty years ago of a single locus secondary school, why then do we need the extra NCE competition bundled in after the PSAC and prior to the O-levels for Academies? The more so as those non-academically gifted pupils who may represent at term 30% or more of the secondary school population will be better cared for elsewhere allowing teachers to focus on those with academic bent…To non-practitioners like me, it seems like a glorious waste of time, money and efforts and an exemplar of the exacerbated competitive spirit and pressures left behind as legacy.

The Minister, to my mind, should have no qualms in April to press participants for ending both the NCE and the Academies. Readers may recall that the private and confessional streams, despite pressures to fit in, declined to convert their colleges into two-stage schools, a sort of Junior College to Grade Nine and an Academy, following which the reform contraption and disruption was thrust onto the public sector only.

Readers are also cognizant of the fact that for too many children of academic bent, and often their accompanying parents, school life is reduced to rushing after school hours to tuition centers from Grade IV onwards, through PSAC, the NCE, the O-levels, to their final year A-levels or HSCs.

* Do we need to fail children at PSAC?

This is another question that needs addressing in April by our best pedagogues working constructively with the Ministry and Establishment. Expressed this way, it may sound strange to those within the system, but if the three-year Foundational Course becomes a reality during the year, with the dedicated efforts of every stakeholder, then the natural question arises, why should we (or the system) wait until the non-academically gifted has floundered at PSAC before offering him or her a different avenue of personal development?

Psycho-pedagogues have long known that a school or a body of teachers at the school can easily identify the non-academically gifted ones after 3 (at most 4) years of primary schooling. One must remember that the school is very often a hostile environment for such students, where they make few friends and isolated and where teachers pressed by syllabi fail to adequately help them out. There is no logic in keeping them constrained for longer than is needed before inviting their parents to consider an alternative education pathway leading to the Foundation Course for Grades 7. No two-year exams for PSAC but an orientation that is voluntary, the decision being made by parents after explanations by the school staff. That means a 2–3-year bridge program that should in priority reconcile the non-academically gifted students with learning in a friendlier and more cooperative setting where learning is fun and activity-driven.

If our community of pedagogues can devise such a cursus (and there is no reason to feel otherwise) that seams into the Foundation Course, and if our administrators can work out the logistics, we would have gone a long way to doing away with the academic straitjacket and establishing an enduring double-barrelled system of education more in tune with our socio-economic realities while catering for skills and competencies in the country’s future work-force.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 27 December 2024