The re­cent sug­ges­tion by the Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Clifton De Coteau, to con­sid­er shift­ing the date of SEA from March to May needs to be care­ful­ly as­sessed to en­sure that such a de­ci­sion adds val­ue to the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem and not un­nec­es­sary stress to all stake­hold­ers. Such a de­ci­sion will not add any mean­ing­ful or sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ty or qual­i­ty of time to the stu­dents' over­all ed­u­ca­tion. SEA usu­al­ly comes at the end of the East­er term. School re­opens for the last term of the aca­d­e­m­ic year in the mid­dle to third week of April, so re­al­is­ti­cal­ly on­ly one month of ex­tra teach­ing time is made avail­able. This short ex­tra pe­ri­od can­not have a se­ri­ous im­pact or im­prove SEA per­for­mance. SEA year is a stu­dent's sev­enth year at pri­ma­ry school and it is rea­son­able to ask what new or dif­fer­ent can be done to im­prove per­for­mance in the ex­tra month?

For those who wish to analyse the SEA re­sults, there are cer­tain dis­turb­ing mak­ers which the ex­tra pe­ri­od can­not al­ter. With uni­ver­sal sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion, over 2,000 stu­dents an­nu­al­ly score un­der 30 per cent in SEA. This fig­ure is hid­den be­cause schools keep back nu­mer­ous Stan­dard Five stu­dents who are as­sessed as not ex­am-ready. There­fore, it is safe to con­clude that as many as 3,500 stu­dents are in the per­for­mance zone of un­der 30 per cent. Of the ap­prox­i­mate­ly 17,000 stu­dents who wrote the SEA, al­most half of them failed to score a 50 per cent av­er­age in lan­guage arts, cre­ative writ­ing and math­e­mat­ics. These sign posts iden­ti­fy fun­da­men­tal flaws in the pri­ma­ry schools, which an ex­tra month of ed­u­ca­tion can­not re­dress. Na­tion­al Tests are con­duct­ed through­out the pri­ma­ry school sys­tem. Over a four-year pe­ri­od, de­fi­cien­cies in stu­dents ought to be clear to prin­ci­pals, teach­ers, par­ents or guardians.

To­geth­er with oth­er ex­am­i­na­tions pre­pared and ad­min­is­tered by the school, the ar­eas that need strength­en­ing are iden­ti­cal dur­ing a stu­dent's pri­ma­ry school years. If these de­fi­cien­cies were not ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed over sev­en years, how will an ex­tra month make a dif­fer­ence? The min­is­ter's as­ser­tion is that the Gov­ern­ment was con­sid­er­ing chang­ing the date from March to May be­cause stu­dents' per­for­mance over the last three years were con­sis­tent and with lit­tle im­prove­ments. It is com­mon knowl­edge that the last Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion and the var­i­ous di­vi­sions had pre­pared a ro­bust pro­gramme of work to as­sist un­der-per­form­ing schools. In spite of the vol­ume of work done by ed­u­ca­tors, across the spec­trum, there were no im­prove­ments. In fact, there was a small in­crease in the num­ber of stu­dents scor­ing un­der 30 per cent in SEA in 2000. There are al­so sev­er­al per­ti­nent and ba­sic ques­tions which must be asked and an­swered if there is to be re­al im­prove­ment in SEA. Among these are: How many stu­dents un­der-per­form in SEA be­cause they at­tend school very in­fre­quent­ly? And what mea­sures does the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion have to en­sure that stu­dents are com­pelled to at­tend school, es­pe­cial­ly since pri­ma­ry school at­ten­dance is legal­ly com­pul­so­ry?

Ed­u­ca­tors must in­ves­ti­gate the im­pact of pover­ty and poor nu­tri­tion of stu­dents and the fail­ure rate in SEA? To what ex­tent are pri­ma­ry school teach­ers re­al­ly prop­er­ly trained (not one-day work­shops) to help slow learn­ers im­prove in the re­quired time frame? The lead­er­ship skills of prin­ci­pals and prop­er su­per­vi­sion of cur­ric­u­lar de­liv­ery con­tribute to the suc­cess or fail­ure in SEA. The stu­dent sup­port ser­vices were de­signed to pro­vide qual­i­ty in­ter­ven­tion on a time­ly ba­sis to needy stu­dents but have failed. There is no as­sur­ance that the ex­tra month would not be wide­ly used by the teach­ers for sick and oc­ca­sion­al days ab­sent from school. In the de­sire to pro­mote im­proved per­for­mance, it is nec­es­sary to re­flect on the men­tal state of the 20 per cent of stu­dents who are at the peak or readi­ness by March of the ex­am­i­na­tion year. These are stu­dents who have max­imised the use of ed­u­ca­tion­al time, pos­si­bly suf­fered through week­ly and week­end lessons, con­duct­ed in­de­pen­dent and group stud­ies and made them­selves ful­ly SEA ready. It would be an in­jus­tice to them to wait through the East­er va­ca­tion and added time to write the SEA. This group con­sti­tutes an im­por­tant fu­ture in­tel­lec­tu­al bank.

While ex­am­i­na­tions are crit­i­cal, it is al­so im­por­tant to re­mem­ber that this is not the on­ly pur­pose of ed­u­ca­tion. Stu­dents in many schools af­ter the March SEA are pro­vid­ed with a wide di­ver­si­ty of ex­pe­ri­ences by their schools, which de­vel­op their so­cial and hu­man skills. The Ma­ha Sab­ha schools are ful­ly oc­cu­pied post-SEA. There are cul­tur­al pro­grammes, na­tion­al sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, school out­ings and weeks of grad­u­a­tion ex­er­cis­es and oth­er learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ences which pre­pare stu­dents for their tran­si­tion to sec­ondary schools. We ought to look at prefer­able al­ter­na­tives be­fore ad­min­is­ter­ing SEA at a lat­er date. It is prefer­able to re­duce Christ­mas and East­er va­ca­tions by a week each and cre­ate the ex­tra time. It is well known that stu­dents are more in a per­for­mance-dri­ven mode from Sep­tem­ber to March. In light of these ar­gu­ments, it is clear that more con­sid­er­a­tion should be giv­en to any change in the SEA date.

Sat­narayan Ma­haraj is the

sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the

Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha