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THE teachers' union and school principals appear to be heading toward an agreement to allow students who deferred their 2021 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) examinations until next year to be given spaces when the new school year begins in September.
The Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) says schools will try as best as possible to facilitate the repeating of the more than 6,000 students who have deferred the sitting of their exams.
However, the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS) is anticipating manifold issues surrounding the next academic school year.
"There is no obligation on the part of schools to allow students to repeat, as this is a function of the number of students and the available space in the institutions. Schools will, however, facilitate this arrangement as much as is possible," Jasford Gabriel, president of the JTA, told the Jamaica Observer.
Gabriel said the JTA suggested similar approaches to treat with the deferrals, as well as an accelerated programme within the regular curriculum. "This can be accomplished by grouping deferred students within the regular classrooms and providing the additional resources required to fast-track learning," he added.
"The summer period should be dedicated to treating this in an aggressive way, as well as dealing with the social, mental, emotional, nutritional and financial challenges that most of these students may be encountering. The objectives should be to get all students in school September, to participate in the programme of intervention," said Gabriel.
But JAPSS President Linvern Wright told the Sunday Observer that there are foreseeable challenges.
"They are going to have a challenge because those schools will be taking in the same number of students, so they will have a space problem. And they will also have a pedagogical challenge in the sense that these students will be way behind just the same. And classes are [going to be] bigger and [as such] will be problematic," said Wright.
"If it is that the Ministry [of Education] is going to offer some support in giving those schools extra teachers to assist with that, then that should alleviate any kind of difficulties they would have," Wright said.
Education Minister Fayval Williams said recently that the ministry would have given a commitment to students who deferred exams to January 2022, in terms of both space and resources.
Wright, who is principal of William Knibb Memorial High School in Trelawny, said there were no deferrals at his institution as, having anticipated various issues, he said many principals like himself would've made a calculated push to have the students sit the examinations this year.
"Many schools don't have deferrals. We recognised the fact there would not have been the space for them. We tried to do our best to work with them, so once we got a chance to meet them face-to-face, we tried our best with them. We know it's not the ideal situation, but it makes no sense telling them to defer and then the instructional consistency for next year may be worse," he said.
Added Wright: "So, we encouraged the students to try to take it because if it is that they take the examination this year, at least they would have a sense of the examination and what it requires. And if they have to do it next year again, at least they would have some sense as to what is required of them."
But Gabriel said that the deferrals were absolutely necessary for some.
"Teachers are in full support of the deferrals as students need to be sufficiently well-prepared to undertake the rigorous demands of external examinations. These examination results, to a large extent, determine future careers," he argued.
"There is hope for the over 120,000 students unaccounted for. The first level must be to locate the students and work through the varying mitigating circumstances that they are encountering. This requires a targeted and broad-based effort to get into communities and engage the parents, guardians and students themselves."