All of us — be it at the individual, group, or organisational levels — rely on the services provided by Government to some considerable degree.

In any society, though, those who make the most progress are usually the ones able to find their own path without having to rely too heavily on others — Government or otherwise.

Those thoughts were triggered as we read this week about Yallahs High School in St Thomas which sought to proactively help illiterate and innumerate children entering the school from the primary level.

School Principal Mr Mark Malabver tells us that when the 2024-25 batch of seventh graders — numbering 123 — arrived last September, 99 of them were found to be reading below their grade level.

Rather than simply going with the flow, Mr Malabver and his teachers crafted what he describes as “… a programme that has essentially driven the transformation in terms of the low literacy and numeracy levels of our students at grade seven…”

Despite serious resource inadequacies, including unstable Internet and weak support systems for learning, Yallahs High School went to the extent of developing its own workbooks to help children.

Strategic interventions, including grouping students based on their reading level, have led to definitive improvements.

Miss Jodi-Ann Lawes, head of the school’s enrichment department, says the programme helped students progress “…to midsection and to the higher level of the reading band…”

Mr Malabver is clear that with greater resources the school could do much more.

“If we were able to achieve this without the resources, imagine what we could do if we had the resources… The students are going to come to us in the way they come to us. What we are asking for is the resources. We have highly qualified and highly committed teachers to do the job, but we need the infrastructural support, the resource support to move the students along. It cannot be that we are left in the way that we have been left to fend on our own…” Mr Malabver said.

Of course, as we have pointed out repeatedly in this space, this challenge of children from our most impoverished homes leaving primary school and entering high school with diminished reading and numeracy capacity is widespread in Jamaica.

Just as the case at Yallahs High, numerous high schools — more especially those that are well led — do strive to help needy students with remedial programmes.

It’s imperative that such innovative projects continue as needed, with support from community, past students, business houses, and other interested parties.

Crucially, though, as we have repeatedly also said, literacy and numeracy have to be addressed at the primary level through a well-thought-out, well-resourced, comprehensive, Government-run programme.

Hence, Education Minister Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon’s pledge that reading is to be returned as a timetabled subject area in the primary school curriculum. We await the nuts and bolts of the minister’s plans, even while recognising that upcoming parliamentary elections will likely intervene.

Obviously, though, for whichever party takes political power, the will and resources must be found to bring an end to illiteracy and innumeracy for children entering high school.

Jamaica’s education system is not sustainable in the same old way.