MINISTER of Education and Youth Fayval Williams on Friday expressed her satisfaction with the improved performance of students in this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) across all subjects, saying it highlights the positive impact of recent intervention programmes in primary schools.

During a press conference at the Ministry of Education and Youth in Kingston, Williams announced that 86.7 per cent of the 34,297 students registered for the exams were placed in a school of their choice. Although this represents only a o.7 per cent increase from last year’s 86 per cent, she noted that only 11.2 per cent of students were placed in a high school based on the proximity of their primary school.

In the meantime, Williams celebrated the fact that only 340 students were placed manually, which she said was the lowest number since the introduction of PEP.

She announced that 60 per cent of students performed at the proficient and highly proficient level in mathematics, which was a three per cent increase compared to last year’s performance.

However, she said there is still work to be done.

“When we drill down into the mathematics we note that our students performed well in terms of modelling and data analysis; 84 per cent of the students did well [and] they are in [the] proficient or highly proficient category. Where we have work to do is in problem-solving, and so when we go forward and when we look at the intervention that’s needed then obviously this is an area in which we have to do better in,” she said.

Williams acknowledged, however, that this was still a major improvement on the 51 per cent obtained in 2019.

Language arts saw a seven per cent increase to 67 per cent of students who were graded proficient and highly proficient, which was the highest percentage increase across all four subjects compared to 2023.

Performances in social studies and science also increased by five and six per cent, respectively, as social studies moved up to 72 per cent and science to 70 per cent.

Despite the improvement in social studies performances, Williams noted that more needs to be done to improve students’ ability to evaluate sources and use evidence, as only 42 per cent of students performed well in that category of the subject.

Addressing the issue of student workload, Williams used the opportunity to reiterate that the format of testing students over a three-year period is effective and allows for smoother educational growth and development.

“This form of assessment has several benefits as more accurate claims can be made about students, their achievement of the curriculum, and their progress will be monitored more regularly. More opportunities will be provided for teachers to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, and therefore teachers can plan lessons to meet the specific needs of students and, importantly, students can monitor their own learning,” she explained.

She said the methods used to record students’ performance provides a more holistic overview of what each child knows and that the data gathered can be used to measure the achievement of the National Standards Curriculum in all four subjects.

“The suite of tests are administered over three years and so it takes away the really high stake, one-time-only testing of the past. The way the exams are structured, it’s more friendly to the students and acknowledges that learning is acquired over time and [that] it’s ongoing,” she said.

But Williams noted that, despite the improvements, more rigorous intervention programmes will be implemented in schools to not only further decrease the number of students performing poorly, but increase the number of students performing at the highest level, which is the highly proficient category.

Acting chief education officer at the Ministry of Education and Youth Terry Ann Thomas Gayle said intervention programmes will continue at the lower secondary level to monitor how well students are adjusting to a higher level of education. She said this data will help to monitor the students who did not perform well and their areas of weakness.

“The intervention saw us looking at schools with a large cohort of their students performing with 50 to a hundred per cent at beginning or developing [level], and we will pull the great teachers from those schools. And we have targeted workshops based on the areas — whether it be reading and writing for language arts, whether it be problem-solving for math or conceptual understanding — and we show the teachers how it is that they can pull the objectives from the National Standards Curriculum to develop these areas, based on the levels of their students,” Gayle said.

“Between November last year to March this year we had [a] targeted approach with these teachers and we had the monitoring that continued, and when they went back to their class they had work plans that they had to submit. We will be more intense [in the next school] year because our transformation agenda requires us to not only look at our students’ performance but we must hold persons accountable,” she added.

This year’s PEP marks the first time since its inception that a cohort of students transitioning from grade six will have a profile which has all the components from all 11 tests administered from grade four to grade six.