The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

EDUCATION Director Lionel Sands believes the National High School Diploma Programme coming on stream next month is the most significant attempt to improve this country’s education system in his lifetime.

Coming from a man who has spent 43 years in education, played a pioneering role in establishing the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) in the early 1990s and spent the last seven years serving as the nation’s top non-elected education official, that’s high praise.

Nonetheless, the programme almost didn’t see the light of day,

Mr Sands explained.
“The idea (for the programme) first came across when Ivy Dumont was minister (of education) and we knew from back then that that was the place to go,” he said, referring to the former governor general who was education minister between 1995 and 1999.

“When Alfred Sears became minister, he tried but was unsuccessful in bringing it on and Desmond Bannister didn’t get support from Cabinet when it was time for his colleagues to agree with it. Jerome Fitzgerald, however, has gotten the government to agree with what we were seeking to do.”

The failure to get the programme started sooner was because of disagreement among education professionals, said Mr Sands.

“We couldn’t get consensus within education so it was difficult to sell it to the outside world.”

“The difficulty,” he said, was because some ‘old fashioned’ educators focused on the business-as-usual approach to education where students “go to school, learn math, English, get BGCSe and that’s it”.

However: “One has to understand that education is much more than that. Children are different and we have to be more student-
centred than school-
centred.”

The high school diploma programme wants to increase the number of high school graduates and give them greater job opportunities by tailoring their curriculum to their individual abilities and needs.

Students will be divided into three groups: a college bound group of students, a group of “work-place” students and a group for students destined to join apprenticeship programmes.

All students will be required to take the core subjects of mathematics, english language, science, social science, civics and physical education.

There will, however, be differences in their curriculum depending on the group they are in. Students taking english language, for instance, will take either “English academic”, “English college,” English applied” or “English workplace”.

“The new programme will allow students who may not be not excellent in math and english but in carpentry and stuff like that to have a chance. We will focus on their interests rather than lock them in certain paths,” Mr Sands said.

To earn a high school diploma from now on, students, among other things, will have to maintain a cumulative GPA of 2.0 through grades 10 and 12, attain four subjects in the BJC exam and complete a minimum of 28 credit hours in grade.

Students who fail to meet the requirements will get an attendance certificate upon completion of the programme.

Noting that the programme would take time to reap positive effects, Mr Sands admitted that it will “not be a panacea for all the problems we have”.

He said he wants to see the programme succeed before he exist the education profession.