From all re­ports, it was smooth sail­ing with the ad­min­is­tra­tion

of the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment  (SEA) ex­am­i­na­tion yes­ter­day. 

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly said there were “no ma­jor hic­cups,” a view that was con­firmed by feed­back from key stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing TTUTA, the Na­tion­al Pri­ma­ry Schools Prin­ci­pals’ As­so­ci­a­tion (NAPSPA) and the Move­ment for Con­cerned PTA Par­ents. 

These are un­prece­dent­ed times for T&T’s ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem. The 19,651 stu­dents who wrote the ex­am­i­na­tions — 9,904 boys and 9,747 girls—did most of their prepa­ra­tions re­mote­ly. Get­ting this far was in it­self an achieve­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the size of the dig­i­tal di­vide many of them had to nav­i­gate to com­plete the SEA cur­ricu­lum. 

Full cred­it must be giv­en to the teach­ers who had to quick­ly ad­just to on­line learn­ing sys­tems to pre­pare their charges for this cru­cial ex­am, as well as par­ents who had the of­ten nerve-wrack­ing task of steer­ing their chil­dren through 15 months of un­cer­tain­ty as they pre­pared for the ex­am. 

 But the test­ing times are not yet over, as hun­dreds more stu­dents across T&T are cur­rent­ly writ­ing their Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tion (CAPE) and Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) ex­ams, in an ex­er­cise that start­ed on June 14 and con­tin­ues for an­oth­er fort­night. 

The fo­cus now shifts ful­ly to en­sur­ing that these young peo­ple can get through their ex­am­i­na­tion timeta­bles, stretched out over sev­er­al days, safe­ly, in full com­pli­ance with all pub­lic health pro­to­cols and with­out dis­rup­tions. 

Once these ex­ams are com­plet­ed, even big­ger tests loom for the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, which is aim­ing for a re­turn to in-per­son class­es with the re­open­ing of schools for the 2021/2022 school year in Sep­tem­ber. 

The hur­dles to be faced are not lim­it­ed to retro­fitting class­rooms for phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing, fre­quent sani­tis­ing and oth­er pub­lic health and safe­ty con­sid­er­a­tions. There are al­so the yet to be de­ter­mined eco­nom­ic and so­ci­etal con­se­quences of the pro­tract­ed school clo­sures. 

Then there are the gaps in the de­liv­ery of ed­u­ca­tion which  have widened con­sid­er­ably dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. 

So far, Dr Gads­by-Dol­ly and ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers are get­ting mixed re­views on their ef­fort over the past 15 months to en­sure con­ti­nu­ity of ed­u­ca­tion through re­mote learn­ing. Hun­dreds of stu­dents were left with­out hav­ing ac­cess to com­put­ers or the in­ter­net and this prob­lem of un­equal ac­cess will have to be dealt with in the com­ing school year.   

Hope­ful­ly, draw­ing from the lessons of the pan­dem­ic, the tech­nocrats are at work on new poli­cies to help with the set­ting up of nec­es­sary tech­nol­o­gy in­fra­struc­ture, should there be fu­ture in­stances when learn­ing will have to go com­plete­ly on­line. 

Clos­ing the learn­ing gap for dis­ad­van­taged pupils and deal­ing with the high dropout rate are ma­jor hur­dles for ed­u­ca­tors, pol­i­cy­mak­ers and oth­ers with a stake in the pub­lic school sys­tem. 

There is al­so the mat­ter of re­as­sur­ing par­ents that schools will be safe, par­tic­u­lar­ly if COVID-19 con­tin­ues to be a sig­nif­i­cant threat come Sep­tem­ber. 

And the min­is­ter and her team should tell the na­tion, soon­er rather than lat­er, whether they will be able to of­fer high-qual­i­ty re­mote learn­ing or blend­ed learn­ing should there be dif­fi­cul­ties in re­turn­ing to full phys­i­cal class­es in the com­ing school year. 

There is still a lot of work to be done. SEA 2021 was just one of many ed­u­ca­tion chal­lenges to be faced.