WITH the general elections just under three weeks away, the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) has put on the table a checklist of issues it insists warrants the attention of the two major political parties in the race to form the next government.

“No party should be voted in unless they have made it clear to the Jamaican people how they are going to fix the education system — none,” said JTA president Paul Adams before detailing the education issues he maintained should be covered by the incumbent Jamaica Labour Party and the Opposition People’s National Party.

Topping the list is the future of the shift system, which the organisation says needs decisive action after years of being largely ignored by successive governments.

“I would want both political parties to indicate their position on the shift system and to also outline a timetable for the removal of the shift system from the education system,” Adams told Career & Education.

“I made that call at conference back in August and asked the minister of education (Andrew Holness, now also Jamaica’s prime minister) then, to invite us to a meeting with the ministry (of education) and private sector, the church and other interests to discuss it. It has not been done and we need it,” he added.

According to Adams, it is past time that the shift system be banished.

“There is a level of injustice done to people’s children that is bordering on cruel… The students on shift one and shift two are not benefiting from a quality education. The shift system was deemed to be a failure from 1976, two years after it was implemented. (Yet) government after government have not only maintained, but have increased the number of schools on it,” Adams said.

The all-age and junior high school system, which the JTA president described as “a travesty”, also came in for criticism.

“The child in the all-age school, grades seven to nine, and the child in the junior high school, aged seven to nine, do not benefit from the same secondary education as those in the high schools. So all of those schools must go and we must have full five-year education for every Jamaican child,” Adams said.

The political parties, he noted, need also to “outline how they will construct new schools and create additional school places to deal with the overcrowding” in many institutions.

Next on the list is the need for intervention for children with special needs at each stage of the education system.

“They will (need to) address the national assessment programme that was from 1998, which required that intervention be done with respect to the deficiencies that are shown up from the (first) assessment that is done — the grade one individual learning profile that the students do on entry in primary school. The whole purpose was (to design intervention) for the students who, by way of that assessment, show deficiencies,” he told Career & Education.

“Then, when they reach grade three, another assessment is done which is the readiness test and intervention would have been put in place also for those who showed deficiencies from that assessment. The Grade Four Literacy Test would have been the next one and intervention would have been put in place before they do the GSAT (Grade Six Achievement Test) for placement in high school,” Adams added.

The failure of governments to do the interventions over time, he said, is what has led ultimately to the Alternative Secondary Transition Programme and some of the problems that persist in a number of high schools.

“All the corrective measures to be taken, the teachers know because they have the data. What they don’t have is the resources and the intervention programme to do the correction. That is one of the defining things that governments have been dodging,” Adams noted. “What you see in that Grade Four Literacy Test performance is that the students that the teachers are not reaching are the same students who showed deficiencies in the grade one individual learning profile… (With) some of them it is visual problems, some is hearing, some is autism problems… nutrition problems… some of them have mental retardation problems.”

“This is the most fundamental of all the issues affecting the education system. If the (next) government goes back to the 1998 national assessment programme to look at its provisions, design, use and intervention strategies, if that is properly funded and executed, we would reap the benefits tremendously at the end of high school,” Adams said further.

But that was not the end of the list. The JTA boss said far more needs to be done to beef up security on the campuses of schools across the island.

“The schools are open — no perimeter fence to deal with personnel and school property — so many schools, especially the primary schools, have millions of dollars of equipment and no security and the lives and property of persons are at risk,” Adams said.

“The safety and security policy of the ministry is a policy in script, but there is no funding towards the policy… That safety and security policy must now be supported by the resources in order for it to be implemented,” he said.

Rounding out the list, Adams said, is the need for the parties to clearly articulate their policy on the closure of small schools.

“We do not support the closure of any school. We are short of a number of schools and those schools that are small are small because of governments’ lack of attention to these deep rural schools, which has created overcrowding in the urban schools. All they need to do is to improve on the facilities,” he said.

“Remember that all the schools benefit from the same quality teachers, so it is not the teachers… The teachers are trained, qualified and competent and the schools that are deemed to be performing extremely well have the same teachers as the schools that are not doing well. There are only two differences — one is the facilities they are working with and two, the quality of the students,” Adams added.JTA’s checklist

Shift system

Intervention for special needs students

Security on school property

Overcrowding in schools

Small schools