A proposal from a government-appointed committee that some high-performing students in the annual GSAT exam be allocated to non-traditional high schools will not be implemented, at least for this year, Minister of Education and Youth Maxine Henry-Wilson said Wednesday.

In fact, any such a change in the policy of determining which high schools children attend following the GSAT will not be implemented without consensus from all stakeholders, the minister added.

“That is something we are going to have to consider seriously before implementing. it won’t be implemented this year for sure,” Henry-Wilson told the Observer.

“If we are providing choice (of schools that parents want their children to attend), we can’t limit the choice. If we think we have to allow parents to make the choice and do the allocations based on established criteria. We may want to change the criteria but that will require much discussion and also consensus,” the minister added.

Her response, however, did not seem to rule out the possibility that eventually, students of varying abilities may be placed in both traditional and non-traditional high schools if stakeholders can agree on a formula for doing so.

The proposal to mix students who perform well in the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) with others who perform at lower levels in high schools came from a committee which probed the late release of last July.

“First, we are unanimous that choice must remain a permanent feature of placement consideration for the foreseeable future, if only because of the psychological influence it wields on performance,” the report said.

“However, even with the provisioning of additional high school spaces, by the building of new schools, mechanisms must be found for implementation in policy that drives a more equitable placement of quality students in these high schools.

“We therefore recommend that some mechanism be found to make a meaningful selection of a ‘new’ high school part of the choice of higher-scoring GSAT candidates. This may entail radical approaches, including the populating of these new schools with, in the first instance, high achievers from the Grade 7 cohort only,” said the minister.

At present parents of GSAT candidates have five choices of high schools that they would like their children to attend. The students are allocated to the schools based on their performance, with those performing the best being sent to the school of their first choice, those performing slightly lower getting their second choice school, and so on.

Inevitably, top performers are sent to high-performing traditional schools, with low performers being sent to under performing non-traditional schools.