The Tribune

By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

A LEARNING loss survey found that 44 per cent of public school students require urgent learning intervention, Education Minister Glenys Hanna Martin said yesterday.

The ministry surveyed public school students while partnering with Renaissance Learning Inc, a company providing the government $1m in consultancy services for diagnostic assessment and accelerated learning recovery.

Mrs Hanna Martin said there were two rounds of testing, the second to capture the impact of intervention efforts.

She said 33,420 students were given a reading test in round one, and 29,960 were given the reading test in round two.

She said 29,926 students sat the math test in round one, and 25,330 did so in round two.

However, she said many students were not tested; officials are trying to determine why they were unavailable.

“The students who were not tested are being sought out by the project coordinator in conjunction with the relevant schools and the attendance unit,” she said in the House of Assembly yesterday during her budget contribution.

“The findings of this testing are the cause for significant concern and has revealed that the greatest need for urgent intervention is in New Providence, Grand Bahama, Abaco and Eleuthera.”

“Now, I want to say that I am inclined to believe that this 44 per cent of our student population is not necessarily all that we can put into what we call learning loss and its potentially systematic gaps that have prevailed and persisted over a very long period of time in our educational system. And so, I suspect that this captures the entire bundle of learning loss that these students may be faced with.”

Strategies to deal with learning loss involve summer programmes, early morning classes, at-home remediation and the assistance of non-governmental agencies, Mrs Hanna-Martin said.

“So this is not a small task, and it has to be coordinated, strategic and sustained, and this is what we’re looking at in the short term,” she said. “I hope it’s short term. It may be short to medium term to intervene with these young people to allow them to catch up.”

Mrs Hanna Martin said school attendance rates increased significantly during the previous school year.

She said the 2022/23 school year attendance rate of 94 per cent was a major jump from the previous school year, when over 4,000 students were absent from classes.

“Our review has shown that the country has seldom, if ever in recent years, seen this level of attendance and the achievement is indeed remarkable,” she said.