KINGSTON, Jamaica – A total of 126 primary and 56 secondary schools are being targeted for intensive intervention as the Ministry of Education and Youth puts measures in place to get back to pre-COVID-19 literacy levels.

Portfolio Minister Fayval Williams said that the targeted institutions are those that got an unsatisfactory rating in certain key performance indicators (KPI).

These are teaching in support of learning, student academic performance, student academic progress, and curriculum and enhancement programmes.

Overall, a total of 248 underperforming schools will receive support under the school improvement framework to improve literacy rates, Minister Williams said.

She was addressing Wednesday’s post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House.

The minister noted that already, several initiatives are under way, including the pilot Literacy Education Acceleration Programme (LEAP) involving six schools in regions one and four.

“The programme was used to bridge the gap in literacy… . We have results and we are quite impressed with the results. Ten hours of intervention on this programme resulted in improvements by eight months in reading and six months in spelling ages,” the education minister said.

She noted that 60 per cent of the treatment group improved at least one grade level, 29 per cent saw improvements of two or more grade levels, and 10 per cent by three or more grade levels.

“So, we are seeing something here that we can, hopefully, scale up across the system to improve literacy,” she said.

Another intervention is the Creative Language-based Learning Foundation’s programme, which is being undertaken in several schools.

“We are seeing good results here as well, and we will continue this programme in our schools,” the minister noted.

These measures, among others, will be critical as the ministry looks to increase and maintain the literacy rate at grade four by 2026.

The target is 80 per cent for 2023/24; 85 per cent for 2024/2025; and 90 per cent by 2025/2026.

“In 2019, we achieved literacy rates of 83 per cent at the grade-four level but the grade four test that we generally do was not administered in 2020 or 2021 because of COVID. In 2022, we saw the negative impact of COVID on literacy but we are back on track for 2023,” Minister Williams said.

The grade-four test was administered earlier this year and the results are expected by November 17.

-JIS