OPPOSITION People’s National Party’s spokesperson on education and community development Senator Damion Crawford says the disappointing mathematics performance in the 2024 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams, where only 38.9 per cent of students passed, was signalled from as far back as 2017 when that cohort’s numeracy was assessed.

According to Crawford, education officials ignored those early indications and missed the opportunity for remediation.

Speaking at a virtual press briefing hosted by the party at its St Andrew headquarters on Wednesday, Crawford urged the Government to refrain from blaming teachers for the outcome and to instead conduct research to unearth the facts.

According to the Opposition spokesperson, his own analysis “of the cause of the poor outcomes” dates back to the Grade Four Numeracy results for the cohort which was publicly reported in 2017 and stood at 66 per cent. He said the writing on the wall was even more prominent when the figures for mathematics was no better in the cohort’s 2019 Primary Exit Profile (PEP) which was 41 per cent.

“This might be one of the reasons we may have this cohort’s CSEC math performance being 36 per cent. I became very concerned because even at the PEP level, high proficiency was only 2,624 of the 40,000 students that did the exam. So almost 37,000 would not have been in the high proficiency category. [Even] more unfortunate, 27,300 did not achieve simple proficiency at that time,” Crawford said.

“Why is this important? It shows that very little remedial effort was taken between when we saw that there was a problem in grade four and again saw that there was problem in grade six and we waited until the problem really started to show itself when there was limited ability to remediate in grade 11,” he told members of the media.

The just released CSEC results for Jamaica showed that the majority of students sitting the exam managed to get a grade three. Of the 31,325 that took the exam, 2,264 were absent, 374 received a score so low their papers were not graded. A grade 6 was received by 113, grade five was received by 8,306, grade four by 10, 232, grade 3 by 4,875, grade 2 by 3,078 and a grade 1 by 2,076.

“The ministry needs to do research into the reason for the outcome,” Crawford said, while contending that the oversight on the part of education authorities had “caused many to not matriculate to university and caused only 18 per cent to have five subjects or more”.

“Trinidad has a 45 per cent outcome of persons receiving five subjects including math and English, Jamaica had an 18 per cent. So, Trinidad is almost three times the functionality of Jamaica,” Crawford said.

According to Opposition spokesman, should his party form the next government, in five years of its leadership, the country would be “effectively competing with Trinidad and Tobago and others” in the exam outcomes.

Crawford’s assertions were supported by Dr Kenneth Russell, the Opposition’s deputy spokesperson on education and community development, who said, “the problem is that we have the data but we are not using it”.

According to Russell, the initial data from PEP which showed that “proficiency” was low for the majority had been an early indicator of the CSEC math passes now being seen.

On Monday, Education Minister Fayval Williams, in addressing the results, said while “improvements” have been noted in the performance of Jamaican public school students in the 2024 Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), the ministry is concerned about the achievement of students in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination, with particular dissatisfaction over the mathematics results.

The education minister, in noting that the data showed that there have been fluctuations in the regional performance in key subjects specifically for maths and English A, said Jamaica had “recorded a decline”. The education minister was keen to point out that the comparison was being done between the 2022 and 2024 performance, given that there had been exam breaches in 2023, which led to CXC modifying its grading scheme for that year.

“We would not encourage a comparison with the 2023 exam; the best year for comparison would be 2022. In maths for 2022, the score was 37.3 per cent with 38.9 for 2024, a 1.6 percentage point difference; we here at the ministry will have to redouble our efforts for maths,” Williams said, noting that even based on the comparison with that year the ministry was still not satisfied with the performance of students in the maths exams.