KEY stakeholders in the country’s education system are calling on the Ministry of Education to implement measures to rescue scores of children who populate the more than 300 primary and all-age schools across the country which are forced to combine as many as three sets of students in a single classroom, with one teacher.

Some educators say the institutions — defined as ‘multi-grade’ schools — need urgent attention, as most of them are struggling to offer quality education to students.

Multi-grade schools exist in many countries and play an important role in providing access to education for children in isolated and underdeveloped rural areas.

However, some local educators contend that Jamaican multi-grade schools are terribly short of resources and support, which they claim would empower their teaching staff to achieve better outcomes.

The principal of one such school, located in a remote area, who chose not to be named for this article, told the Sunday Observer that in most instances, the student population at these schools is made up of children from very poor families, who cannot afford to send them to more prominent schools in other communities or towns.

The typically low student population at some of these rural schools contributes to their multi-grade status, as the Ministry of Education, more often than not, discourages the employment of new teachers, since teachers are engaged based on the size of the student population at a school.

Speaking with the Sunday Observer, Chief Inspector at the National Education Inspectorate (NEI) Maureen Dwyer explained that school administrators in these remote communities move to combine classes when their teaching staff is insufficient to facilitate the standard ratio of one teacher per class.

Dwyer added that if this isn’t done, some schools would end up with as few as five students per class, a situation that would fall way below the ministry’s standard of one teacher to 35 students, a figure usually surpassed in some of the country’s overcrowded primary and all-age schools.

Stevie Williams, the principal of Auchtembeddie All Age, a multi-grade school in Manchester, says working with this system is a major challenge.

“My school has 60 students and three teachers and we go up to grade six. We have grade one by themselves, because we want to focus on their development. We have grades two and three together, taught by one teacher, four by themselves and grades five and six together.

“In grades two and three there is a combination of 22 students, while in grades five and six there are 20 students to one teacher”, said Williams, who complains of having to teach one of the classes even though he has to attend to his other responsibilities as principal.

Williams agreed that, in its purest form, multi-grade schools are good for children.

“Multi-grade teaching is the way to go in Jamaica, but not for what it is in the current state. If you really understand multi-grade teaching, it’s a mixed classroom of different grade levels, different learning levels, where children can learn from each other, that sort of a thing.

“Multi-grade teaching is popular in places like Japan, and even in St. Lucia, which is closer to home. Our problem is resources, the resources are limited, because we do not get anything extra from the ministry. (We get) the same as other schools, because you know that schools are paid per student in terms of grants,” said Williams, as he explained that additional resources such as computers and special educators would help his school to enrich its offerings to the students.

Williams adds that it takes special teachers to operate in multi-grade schools.

“It is at that level that the child is either made or broken. If the teacher does not understand how to operate in a multigrade setting, you are going to find that the teacher becomes frustrated and the students then become frustrated.

“Look at it this way, if a teacher has a grade five class that is fast (above average students), say, all the students are above the grade five level, with a grade four class where none of those students is reading at the grade four level. You are going to find that the teacher is going to need more time with the grade four, so the grade five is going to suffer because they will be left on their own most of the times,” he explained.

“It is hard to give a teacher thirty and forty students of three different grades without providing them with the proper tools, that is cruel,” said the school’s principal, who for some time has been calling on the education ministry to provide additional support to mult-grade schools.

Meanwhile, the Chief Inspector says she is aware of the challenges being faced by multi-grade schools and asserts that something needs to be done.

“The teacher in that setting is called upon to differentiate and to meet the needs of learners of varying levels, so where a teacher has a grade one and a grade two, you are talking about a set of students who are in readiness mode, versus children who are ready to progress to another level. The teacher now has to be very flexible and draw on the strategies that they would have learned through the ministry’s interventions,” she said.

Dwyer explained that only a few of the multi-grade schools are using the special curriculum which the ministry had developed for them. She expressed concern for students exposed to situations where the teaching methods may not be in the best interest of the children.

“The difficulties arise when the teacher has three classes. The few who use the curriculum teach the common content material to all the students before assigning tasks based on the varying levels” said Dwyer.

In her view, the Ministry of Education should move to rationalise multi-grade schools, some of which she says have under thirty students and, in some cases three or five teachers, but are not performing.

“The ministry needs to find them, create a cluster system, where the students would go to a school in a particular locale, and then close the others. Perhaps transportation could be provided for these students. The question is always asked, what are you going to do with the buildings when you close them, and I say use them for other purposes, as community centres, for example”, said Dwyer, an experienced educator who was recently confirmed to the top post in the inspectorate.

Dwyer reiterated that the ministry did not set out to establish multi-grade schools and emphasised that their formation resulted from dwindling populations in some rural communities; either through migration or a reduction in births. Nevertheless she maintains “it’s the children who are suffering”, and called on the ministry to implement an appropriate response to the problem.

However, President of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), Paul Adams, says his organisation is not in favour of school closures.

“Government should not be engaging in the business of closing schools. Based on our observation, all such schools are victims of Government neglect, because these schools have been under-resourced and so parents refuse to send children to these institutions and instead move with their children to places where schools receive stronger support.

“We are then left with a situation where some schools are practically empty, while at others the student population is 200 per cent more than what the school was built to accommodate,” said the JTA President.

Some stakeholders in the education system, including at least one prominent member of the JTA are also not in support of the suggestion to close any of the schools. They contend that such a move would result in the death of some of these villages, where the school represents the hub of community life.

When contacted, Education Minister Andrew Holness acknowledged that there are challenges with some multi-grade schools, but also indicated that some of these institutions were not doing badly.

Holness, however, embraced the need for a rationalisation of such schools.

“My reading of it is that the infrastructure in many of the multi-grade schools has deteriorated and some of the multi-grade schools, by virtue of their size and capacity of the infrastructure, are overcrowded. So the idea is to now look at rationalising the entire education infrastructure and service provision.

“It doesn’t mean we are looking to close all multi-grade schools. What we are doing is looking at those schools that make sense and those that are not viable and take a decision as how to best to serve the community. When people hear ‘rationalise’, the first thing they think is closure, rationalise could mean upgrade as well,” offered Holness.