MARTHA BRAE, Trelawny — President of Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS) Linvern Wright is distancing himself from a recent call for a review of Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations.

PEP replaced the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) as the national secondary school placement test in the 2018-2019 academic year.

Speaking at a recent Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) conference, President Dr Mark Smith described PEP as “GSAT on steroids”.

But weighing in on the issue Tuesday, Wright — who is also the principal of William Knibb Memorial High School — told reporters that the examination is “just a measure of where the students are” and nothing else.

“I don’t know if it’s the exam or the curriculum he’s [Dr Smith] talking about, but in my mind [his comments about PEP are] like an obese person saying his problem is with the scale. The scale is just a measure,” said Wright.

Instead he suggested that the focus should be on “looking into the kinds of things that go into curriculum”.

“What is the level of preparedness? How much are we spending? What is the level of diagnostic work and targeted teaching taking place? I think we have to find a way to ensure that we can account for those things so we can know what is happening,” the JAPSS president argued.

“For example, having gone through COVID and having lost teachers, I don’t think we have yet found a formula to identify what it is that could cause our children not to be learning at rates [seen] before that — although rates before that were not as impressive as we’d have wanted them to be — but I think that is where the focus needs to be,” he added.

Wright was quick to stress that he is not blaming anyone but merely questioning whether schools have enough resources to provide the targeted teaching needed.

“Let’s look at something. Our children who go to non-traditional high schools, especially, go with numeracy and literacy deficits. What have we done commensurate with the deficit they have? So some things are happening, but how much? What’s the magnitude of the work to match the magnitude of the problem? Is it that it is just two ends? The ministry [of education] is saying that something is happening, or is it that we have identified the scale of the problem, and the scale of the solution even far exceeds the scale of the problem so we can’t solve it properly? That is where I think we need to be looking at,” he posited.

He added that the time has come for stakeholders to move away from the knee-jerk reaction to education when examination results are out.

“I think every time we talk about exams when CXC comes out there is an emotional response to education that we need to move away from… Because education has a science to it… but sometimes because we don’t pay attention to it, then we have a problem,” he said.