“Hard work produces success” is the firm conviction of Minister of Education,
Some of the top performers who were recently honoured by the Ministry of Education
Priya Manickchand. Her utterance was forthcoming as she addressed a gathering of education stakeholders at the National Cultural Centre recently. The Minister was at the time speaking of the outstanding national performers who were honoured last week at the 2014 National Education Awards ceremony.
And according to her, the outstanding performances that Guyana has been producing over the years have much to do with the efforts of teachers who are tasked with delivering quality education to the nation’s children. She underscored too that the delivery of education today is also done in an equitable manner.
The Minister in her deliberations therefore reflected on a time when only certain schools were regarded as ‘better than the rest’, a state of affairs that she insists has become a thing of the past. In fact, in reflecting on a time when she attended primary level school, she disclosed that “I could have boasted that I came from the best primary school – Stella Maris.”
But the Minister in interacting with the education stakeholders was assured that Stella Maris is certainly not the best of all primary schools. She quickly conceded that like Stella Maris Primary and other primary schools, secondary schools as well across the country are performing well. “There is no one best school anymore. When I went to school, all the children who got Queen’s College (and everybody used to fight to get Queen’s College because that was the premier school) came from Stella Maris and St Margaret’s, and you got a sprinkling from some other schools like St Gabriel’s and St Agnes, maybe one and two from St Angela’s…everybody else went to school in their Regions,” the Education Minister recounted.
In emphasising that “that’s not so anymore” the Minister noted that when the Ministry announces results, such as the National Grade Six Assessment, students listed among the top two per cent are no longer from the Georgetown schools alone.
“We are announcing children from Cropper in Region Six, Skeldon and Anna Regina and Suddie, and Leonora and Cornelia Ida, Linden, Arapaima in Region Nine…students from all over this country,” the Education Minister proudly asserted.
These top performing children, many of whom went to Queen’s College, also turned out to be the top performers too at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination. “This (Queen’s College) was ‘The School’…while they might want to argue that this is still ‘The School’, I would rather suspect that all of you in here will tell them not so,” the Minister told her attentive audience, whose reaction embraced her observation.
Moreover, the Minister went on to note that the top performers of the country today no longer hail from Queen’s College alone and they are able to secure “more (Grade) Ones than you can count. These are students from Skeldon Line Path Secondary, Saraswati (Vidya Niketan) in Region Three, J. C. Chandisingh, and this year when we were announcing the results and we said Essequibo Islands Secondary there were people who asked ‘What! Where is that?’ This is somewhere in an island in the Essequibo…”
Added to this, the Minister noted that “we made an announcement that there was a child who came within the top students from North West Secondary. Do you know where that is on the map?” she questioned. She continued her deliberations by categorically pointing out that, that while schools that have been known to perform well, continue to perform well; they are now joined by other schools that have never been heard of before.
This the Minister attributed to the equity in the delivery of education.
Source: https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2014/11/05/education-ministry-notes-increase-in-top-performing-schools/