KINGSTON, Jamaica — The Ministry of Education and Youth says it will be seeking to scale up literacy intervention programmes in schools across Jamaica.

According to a release on Monday, the Jamaica Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2022: Situation of Women and Children, launched on Friday (March 15) at the University of the West Indies Regional Headquarters in St Andrew, reported that the level at which students aged seven to 14 are performing in numeracy and literacy is worrying.

The data reportedly revealed that 38 per cent of them have not acquired foundational reading skills, while only 50 per cent of them have acquired foundational numeracy skills.

Portfolio Minister, Fayval Williams, pointed out that 225 schools were identified to be operating at an unsatisfactory level by the National Education Inspectorate, and in response, the Ministry targeted those schools with literacy programmes.

The programmes implemented are Aural, Read, Respond, Oral, Write (ARROW) and Creative Language-Based Learning (CLBL).

“We’ve been piloting these initiatives and we are very, very happy with the results because we are able to move children two and three-grade levels in a short period of time. These are programmes that we really need to scale up so that more of our schools have them,” Williams said.

In disaggregating the data, the MICS reported that about four out of every five children or 82 per cent, ages seven to 14 years, living in the richest households, demonstrated foundational reading skills, compared to less than half or 47 per cent of the children living in the poorest households.

Similarly, one-third or 33 per cent of children, ages seven to 14 years, living in the poorest households, demonstrated foundational numeracy skills, compared to two-thirds or 66 per cent of children living in the richest households.

The MICS was carried out by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) as part of the Global MICS Programme.

Some 7,903 households were surveyed between April and August 2022, including 5,213 women, ages 15 to 49 years, 1,483 children under five years old and 4,313 children aged five to 17.

The Global MICS Programme was developed by UNICEF in the 1990s as an international multipurpose household survey programme, to support countries in collecting internationally comparable data on a wide range of indicators about children and women.

The MICS measures key indicators that allow countries to generate data for use in policies, programmes, and national development plans, and to monitor progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other internationally agreed commitments.