Minister of Education and Human Resource Development Ronald Jones says the Ministry of Education is “shooting in the dark” in relation to some matters.
Jones explained that this situation may be the result of inadequate information to guide decisions or the failure to share the best practices. He was speaking at the Barbados Education and Training Sector Studies workshop on Using Education Data: Best Practices And Lessons Learned From Other Countries. The workshop for principals of secondary schools and tertiary institutions was held at the training room of Illuminat Barbados Limited.
The minister, while noting that educational data and statistics laid a foundation for socioeconomic projections and were essential for timely and targeted policy action by the ministry, explained that the ministry was still experiencing great difficulty in accessing information from the schools. He disclosed that as minister he was unaware of how many students were in the secondary schools in 2010 and complained that it should not take two terms for schools to provide requested information when the technology was readily available to facilitate data analysis.
“Schools should know where every one of their children comes from because it sets up a social dynamic that other school agencies might need; social welfare might need it,” Jones said. “For the primary schools [we] have set aside half-million dollars to support those students who are unable to buy workbooks. How are we going to know in primary schools who those children are unless you have that data informed by social reality?”
The minister added that in an effort not to disadvantage those who were unable to access the workbooks, the funds had been set aside but he expected some problems because of lack of data to guide the process. “Some children may not bring to school any workbooks but [that] may not be because of a social deficit within the home environment, but because of skewed priorities, and the state cannot support skewed priorities and should not, but you are shooting in the dark,” he said.
Jones also stated that there was a gap between the figures provided for the number of students in a year group and the number who receive certificates or sit exams. “We need to know who left our schools without one certificate. It is not about just taking the exam and using those statistics relevant and important as they are, but if a school has 1 000 students in each year group, those statistics that show 500 who take exams. Bring the other 500 and say where they have gone, so when we see statistics we have the exact knowledge of what is going on.”
Jones added that it was not about a school looking good, but about finding out where the children had gone and where they could be found and dealt with immediately so that they could have a second chance. The minister said the ministry intended to fully implement the Education Management Information System, which was introduced in 2007 in all the island’s schools. Once implemented it will provide academic, attendance and class records at the click of a button, he said.
