KINGSTON, Jamaica (JIS) — The Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation (WCJF) is reporting strong performance by adolescent mothers, who sat the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations this year.

Examination Coordinator, Georgianna Galloway Hill, said that 44 girls were entered for CSEC.

“We are pleased with their performance. This year, in six out of the nine core subjects that we entered our students, we had pass rates of 70 per cent and above,” she said at a recent JIS Think Tank.

The WCJF offers CSEC instruction to adolescent mothers at its 42 Trafalgar Road campus in Kingston and through its virtual delivery interface (VDI) at rural sites.

Galloway Hill credits the students’ success to the staging of regular camps and workshops. These are in addition to past paper revision, School-Based Assessment (SBA) guidance and consultation sessions.

“We have marathon camps, which take place for two weeks each year before the CSEC examinations where the teachers will revise with the students and they will sit a mock examination where we try to prepare them as best as possible,” she told JIS News.

“Then we have a final revision camp, which is the week before the exam or the first week of CSEC exams,” she added.

Both virtual and face-to-face students are expected to participate in the study camps and Galloway Hill reported that the performance gap between the groups has reduced, as the VDI students continue to improve.

She said that there are also regional workshops, where for example, the students in Savanna-la-mar, Westmoreland will join the students at the Montego Bay centre in St James and they will study together for a day.

“The young ladies, who are doing the home economics practical assessments, will come to Kingston [and] they will reside in the dormitory for the duration of the assessment,” she noted further.

Galloway Hill said that the WCJF will continue to build on the success by “capitalising on the things that we are getting right and fixing those areas that we need to work on.”

The core subjects offered at the WCJF are mathematics, English Language, social studies, human and social biology, information technology, principles of business, office administration, family resource management and food, nutrition and health.