Dumas challenges Education Minister to replace SEA

Retired head of the public service Reginald Dumas is calling for the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) exam to be replaced by a system that allows children greater equity in entering secondary schools.

At a webinar discussion, titled Will 11-plus Selection and Placements Always be Part of our Future? at UWI's School of Education, St Augustine, on August 25, historian Dr Rita Pemberton said the existing education system is too elitist.

She added the system of assessing students is based on inequity and inequality.

Pemberton said the system promoted the idea of prestige schools and the notion of attending such an institution remained highly revered.

Dumas supported Pemberton’s view, insisting the “whole system of SEA has to be thrown out.

“It has to be replaced by a system in which you do not have these exams to separate the sheep from the goats. You need a system in which everybody is entitled to go to school and where you make every effort to ensure that the schools are of roughly the same level.

“So you don’t have 'elite' schools. We should be talking about schools, so that everybody has an equal opportunity.”

Dumas told Newsday the onus would be on the children to take advantage of their opportunity.

Advocating a “total revolution” in the education system, Dumas challenged Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly to come up with a new model for secondary – school placement that ensures greater equity.

“I am not saying that every child is equal. Some children are brighter than others. Some children work harder than others. You do not expect every child to be at the same level. That is nonsense.

"But the opportunity must be created.”

Dumas said the education system which exists in Finland can be replicated in TT.

“In the Finnish system, you go to a primary school and then move on to secondary school. It is not a question of who passed the exam and come first, second or third, in order to get in.

“It is that education is a right and you should not discriminate among your nationals as to who exercises that right. Everybody should be able to exercise that right.”

Dumas said the SEA follows the same model as its predecessors, Common Entrance and College Exhibition.

In all these systems, he said children write the examinations and “come at a certain level in order to be admitted to certain schools.”

He recalled there were only a few secondary schools during the years of the College Exhibition.

“But now you have a whole slew of schools all over the country. But these schools are at different levels of achievement.”

Dumas said the Concordat, an agreement between late prime minister Eric Williams and religious bodies in 1960, created further inequity.

“The religious bodies love it because it gives the principals of those schools the right to choose, on their own, up to 20 per cent of the children who will get into the schools.”

As a result, he explained: “The exam, generally, and then the right of principals under the Concordat means that the difference in quality between schools is widening, because, obviously, parents are going to try to get their children into what they consider a better school than another school, which is understandable.

“And so the best students are the ones who have moved on, while the others, who have not done so well, go off to the less good schools – and some of them are pretty bad.”

Dumas said such a system perpetuates elitism.

“We are talking about every creed and race finding an equal place and, in fact, this is not happening. Some are more equal than others.”