Henry-Wilson

All 51,000 of the island's primary school students who sat this year's Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) will know their high school placement for the next academic year by Friday, June 8, when their schools will receive the exam results. These results will be issued following the "completion of the marking and placement exercise, which was undertaken in record time," said Minister of Education, Maxine Henry-Wilson. in a press release yesterday.

She said the information will be sent to schools electronically on CD-ROMS with those lacking the capacity to receive it this way, obtaining a hard copy, which, like the electronic copy, will detail "sub-test scores, or detailed performance information, highlighting individual strengths and weaknesses across all subjects".

It is reported that 750 out of the 1,150 "attending" and "receiving" schools are prepared to access the data on the CD-ROM. This aggregation would normally have been released three months later in September.

Full profile

Mrs. Henry-Wilson said the electronically produceddata seeks to facilitate the creation of a full profile on each child; allowing receiving high schools to plan their curriculum to effectively meet the educational needs of incoming students. The minister stated that 65 per cent of these students received placement based on their choices, 32 per cent were placed on the basis of proximity while the other three per cent were manually placed.

Following last year's delayed publication of the GSAT results because of an increase of approximately 2,000 students sitting the exam over the previous year, Mrs. Henry-Wilson said this year's timely release of the results was due to an improvement in planning and technology use.

She said, "This is in keeping with initiatives to improve the ministry's administrative machinery under the public sector modernisation and education transformation programmes."