Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

Guardian Me­dia Op­po­si­tion

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor David Nakhid says this year’s Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am­i­na­tion re­sults show that the Gov­ern­ment is fail­ing stu­dents.

Nakhid, who vis­it­ed sev­er­al schools across the coun­try on Fri­day fol­low­ing the SEA re­sults, said, “No­body in Trinidad and To­ba­go should be sat­is­fied (with the SEA re­sults) even if your child did very well. We are very hap­py for all those stu­dents who did well, but the truth of the mat­ter is that 43 per cent of our stu­dents have failed, be­low 50 per cent. We have a de­clin­ing num­ber of those above 70 per cent, and what that points to is that we have a fail­ing ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem un­der Kei­th Row­ley and Gads­by-Dol­ly.”

The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion an­nounced that there had been an im­prove­ment in stu­dent per­for­mance for the Math­e­mat­ics and Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts writ­ing scores this year com­pared to last year.

How­ev­er, the min­istry stat­ed that there had been a slight de­cline in stu­dents’ over­all scores in this year’s ex­am­i­na­tion.

Nakhid told Guardian Me­dia that un­der­fund­ed com­mu­ni­ties and bro­ken homes con­tribute to poor aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance. Ques­tion­ing what is be­ing done to as­sist the stu­dents who failed the ex­ams, he al­so called on the min­istry to strength­en the stu­dent sup­port ser­vices to deal with psy­cho-de­fi­cien­cies in par­tic­u­lar and put spe­cialised teach­ers in schools.

He rec­om­mend­ed that the min­istry com­mence school re­pairs and raise teach­ers’ salaries, par­tic­u­lar­ly in schools with many stu­dents from bro­ken homes.

“Ei­ther we face it frontal­ly or we are go­ing to be in se­ri­ous prob­lems with those kids that we see fail­ing now in the school sys­tem,” he added.