JAMAICA is the lead country in a Caribbean project aimed at developing programmes and strategies to address educational underachievement in boys.

Dubbed: ‘Advancing the Education of Boys’, the initiative is being undertaken as a pilot in Jamaica and three other Caribbean countries through funding and expertise from the Commonwealth Secretariat. It is expected to last three years.

It is being executed locally by the Ministry of Education, through the Jamaica Teaching Council (JTC) and the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Education Programme Officer for the Commonwealth Secretariat Hipolina Josephs told JIS News that the initiative is in response to the need for support identified by member countries at a consultation in Jamaica a few years ago.

“We understand the gravity of the problem when it comes to the achievement of our boys and, in as much as it is an educational problem, we are also aware of the wider impact it has on society and socio-economic development,” she said.

The Commonwealth Secretariat, she said, was working in different areas to assist with improving the educational outcomes of boys in the four countries selected for the initiative. The other countries are Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, “and one other country that we are in consultation with. We haven’t quite agreed on what exactly we want to do (as yet)”, Josephs said.

She said that Jamaica had taken the lead in the initiative, which was officially launched in Kingston in May, and is well on its way in terms of its readiness for implementation. She noted that lessons learnt from the project locally should inform the process in the other countries.

“We have had varying levels of activities in the different countries, but Jamaica is more advanced… We are going to use the impact of the strategies that we develop and implement and share that with the rest of the region. So, whatever benefit that come out of Jamaica we put it together and we think that the rest of the Caribbean will be able to benefit,” she pointed out.

“So, it is something that we are committed to, we are taking very seriously and we are very pleased that Jamaica is moving forward and we’re looking forward to using our work in Jamaica and the other countries to share and inform, moving forward implementation of strategies in other countries in the region,” she added.

Providing further details on the project, CEO of the JTC Dr Winsome Gordon said that in this initial phase 13 schools have been selected from regions one, two and three, to participate in the initiative.

She said the selections were based on accessibility and comprise Jamaica College (JC), Camperdown, Donald Quarrie, Vauxhall, and Dunoon Park Technical High in region one; Islington High, St Mary Technical, and Oracabessa high schools, in region two; and Ferncourt, Aabuthnott Gallimore, Brown’s Town, and Ocho Rios high schools in region three.

Jamaica College will be the control school, while the other 12 institutions will be treated to the interventions. “The strategies that we develop will be implemented in the 12 schools. We will see the difference in performance between those schools and JC or the relationship in performance,” Dr Gordon told JIS News.

A team has been assembled to conduct a baseline study to determine the best strategies to raise the performance of the young men in Jamaica and prepare the implementation strategy to go forward.

It comprises team leader an evaluation consultant based in Canada, Halcyon Louis; Chancellor of the Mico University College Professor Errol Miller; Public Policy and media analyst based in Canada, Mark Daku; and Educational Research and Development Expert Dr Grace Monroe.

Louis said the baseline study would involve the development of a framework to equip schools to monitor the progress of the young men and allow them to achieve their full potential.

“What we will be doing is adopting a participatory approach and, in doing this, we will be consulting with the boys, their teachers, school principals, personnel at the Ministry and the QEC (Quality Education Circles) as well as the JTC to more or less determine how we can improve the performance of the young men,” she stated.

The QEC is an education community that is used as a strategy to improve the quality of education at all levels of the education system, from early childhood to tertiary.

Louis said, too, that a template will be developed to be completed by principals of the project schools, which will focus on a list of variables that have already been put together by stakeholders on the perceived factors that are impeding the performance of young men.

“We are also going to be conducting one-to-one sessions with principals as well as teachers and we are also going to be engaging the boys in a fact finding mission, so to speak, to capture other factors that have not been foreseen as regards the overall pandemic of boys’ underachievement in the country,” she said.

Dr Gordon said that following the completion of the baseline study, which will also look at the school’s resources, both human and financial, “then we’ll be able to set targets of achievement in the schools”.

She said: “Of course, we are not just going to say they do better in CXC or in the academic programmes, achievement is going to be assessed in their overall performance — academic, non-academic, (and) technical.

“[We will be looking at] how boys behave, who they become, knowing themselves, their self-identity and so on; we’ll be concerned with that dimension of development, so it is the cognitive domain and the affective domain that we will address in the project.”

Dr Gordon said there was an anticipation that the project would go well and should result in boys doing better.

“We expect that they will be more focused, the classrooms will be more engaging, because, at the end of the day, we must find out those teaching strategies that enable boys. So, we want to see more enabling classrooms and therefore, we will focus on training teachers to enable boys to learn,” she says.

She said the ministry was already working with the Commonwealth Secretariat, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), to look at issues and challenges contributing to the performance of boys in Jamaica.

Remedial programmes have also been introduced to improve the educational opportunities for students, most of which are targeted at boys.

The JTC CEO noted that “our boys are very bright”, and just need proper guidance and support.

“The girls are more settled when it comes to reading and studying and so on, but (the boys) find themselves more restless. They don’t want to sit down for too long. At the same time, they are bright boys, they just need the opportunity and the kind of environment that will bring out the best in them and that’s our aspiration, to bring out the best in our boys,” she stated.

Dr Gordon, meanwhile, appealed to the public to “join us in this endeavour”, which she said was vital to Jamaica’s future.

“Everybody, every parent, every business place, every church, every pastor, every politician need to get on board with us in helping to improve the achievement levels of our boys and therefore their productivity,” she said.