WITH growing concern about the number of children entering secondary institutions without the required literacy and numeracy skills, the People’s National Party (PNP) is planning a complete overhaul of primary schools if it is elected to form the next government.

“We believe that the structure of primary schools needs to be reviewed,” PNP spokesman on education Senator Damion Crawford told journalists during a briefing last Thursday.

Crawford pointed to results from the latest Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams which, he said, showed that 12,381 students did not achieve basic proficiency in mathematics, 10,372 children did not achieve basic proficiency in language arts, 10,707 did not achieve the basic proficiency in science, and 9,369 did not achieve basic proficiency in social studies.

According to Crawford, this is a clear indication that something is not right in the structure of Jamaica’s primary level education setup.

“We currently have a singular structure of primary schools where grades one to six is just basically for roundedness. We feel that we need a lower primary and an upper primary in the same way that you have a lower secondary and an upper secondary.

“The lower primary, from grades one to four, will be focused on numeracy, literacy, creativity, and English as a second language. It will mean, therefore, that teachers will have to be trained to be lower primary teachers with those expertise or upper primary teachers which would be roundedness into subjects such as social studies, sciences, math, English, and a general roundedness,” said Crawford.

“Many detractors would immediately say, ‘Why wouldn’t you expose them [the children] to science in the first four years [but] the material for reading can also include scientific material; however, the focus is on comprehension, understanding and literacy,” added Crawford.

He pointed to recent announcements by Minister of Education Senator Dana Morris Dixon that reading is to be added to the timetable of primary schools in the next academic year and argued that this shows a misunderstanding of the difference between reading and literacy.

“Because reading can be word identification while literacy would include comprehension, it is therefore important that the first four years be focused on literacy,” the Opposition spokesman said.

He told journalists that the PNP is also considering the idea of having cohort teachers at the primary level.

This would mean that a teacher would move with a cohort of children through grades one to four before starting with a new cohort.

“It would lead us to be able to hold teachers accountable for sure, but those teachers would, more importantly, form relationships and understanding with those children and be able to understand better, over time, how to carry that child to that milestone of literacy, with another teacher taking over for [grades] five and six to take the child to the milestone of PEP,” added Crawford.

“What we have observed is that we have passed the baton on to everyone, so six grade teacher says, ‘Mi no know how them never learn from five grade,’ and five grade teacher says, ‘I don’t understand what they were doing in four grade,’ and so everyone is saying the one before was the issue.

“So we believe that because of that new structure of lower primary, if we can have agreement with the [Jamaica] Teachers’ Association (JTA), and our teachers, we will retool and retrain lower primary teachers as versus upper primary teachers and lower primary will be focused on creativity, spoken words, English as a second language, the literacy and the numeracy to ensure that we solve that problem,” said Crawford.

In an effort to improve the performance of grade six students sitting PEP, Morris Dixon recently announced that starting next year they will face fewer testing days with mathematics and language arts assessments, as they will be condensed into single-day sittings under new changes.

“For the grade six PEP, we’re going to collapse the exams together. So this means you do all of your mathematics on one day and all of your language arts on one day,” Morris Dixon outlined.

She added that the exam timeline is being shifted from February to the months of April and May to give educators more time to deliver the curriculum to students ahead of the exams, said the minister.

In addition to the scheduling changes, Morris Dixon pointed out that the ministry is to introduce new literacy and numeracy questions within the grade six PEP papers. This is to help the ministry gauge and assess the numeracy and literacy levels of students at the end of primary school, she noted.

“It’s just some questions that we’ve added that give us a touchpoint on numeracy and literacy [because] currently we do not test literacy and numeracy at PEP. PEP is testing the extent to which you’ve mastered the curriculum. It’s a curriculum-based test,” Morris Dixon said.

The education minister has also indicated that for grade five the ministry is considering discontinuing the PEP exam, but has deferred a final decision pending further consultations with the JTA and other stakeholders.

“The changes to PEP also match changes at primary level for grades one, two, and three where we are going to be doing a lot of exciting things, because Jamaica cannot be happy with students leaving primary school not able to read,” said Morris Dixon.

PEP, the national secondary school placement programme — which is administered across grades — consists of performance tasks, ability tests, and curriculum-based tests, aimed at measuring the performances of students relative to the objectives of the National Standards Curriculum.