THA Education Secretary: No link between SEA top student, top school

THA Secretary of Education, Research and Technology Zorisha Hackett has defended her division’s decision to focus on overall school excellence as opposed to the top-performing student in the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination.

At a news conference on July 5, Hackett said the statistics had shown there was no correlation between the top-performing student and the top-performing school.

“Traditionally, we have had this top-ten list and we went around and we pulled out the students and we had this major celebration which is still to be encouraged by parents and schools. But the division, instead chooses to focus on overall school performance,” she said.

Hackett said, this year, the top-performing student wasn’t even in the top 20 schools.

“So we have these anomalies where we have students, because of their own intrinsic motivation, to learn, their ability to probably be talented and excel and they are well-rounded students, we have been noticing that they are balancing sports and academics.”

The parents, she added, had also been very supportive by paying for children to take additional classes.

Hackett said while the division had no concerns about schools celebrating their top-performing student, “It gives the population that opinion that this school is also performing at optimal level.

“And so we have noticed it and decided to focus our celebration on overall school performance.”

This year, she said, a total of 11 schools performed above the national mean as opposed to seven in 2023 and five in 2022.

“So we are seeing that upward trajectory of performance.”

Hackett said six additional schools performed above the national mean this year, five of which were from the eastern part of the island.

Noting that 478 girls and 519 boys sat the SEA, Hackett said there was improvement in the overall performance.

She said the main measure of student performance at the SEA was the total score which tallies the Mathematics, English and essay components of the exam. The national average total is 200 points.

In Tobago, Hackett said, the girls’ average increased from 197. 64 in 2023 to 201.38 in 2024, performing above the national average. The boys’ overall average increased to 192. 28 from 190. 27 in 2023.

“This means that overall, our girls who were three points away from the national average in 2023 have now gained a four-point mean score while the boys are eight points away. This underscores the importance of focusing on gender as we have been doing, and the performance of boys.”

She said if the girls maintained the performance, the boys must score eight points more on average for all of Tobago’s students to perform above the national mean.

Hackett said the SEA results also showed a decline in the number of Tobago students performing under 30 per cent, which is down from 159 last year to 138 in 2024.

“The remedial students, however, had an average total score of 156.19 and this meant that the actual average of the non-remedial students in Tobago went up from 200.60 to 203.14 in 2024.”

She added this finding will be the basis for a Tobago district assessment to identify at-risk students before the examination and the remedial efforts within the school system.

Hackett said the division Project Impact initiative for students in standards 3, 4 and 5, during the upcoming vacation period, will be useful in this regard.

She said the performance of Tobago’s students by gender had revealed “a mixed set of insights into the performance dynamic.

“Boys mean total score was eight points adrift of the national mean, down from ten points in 2023. However, this appeared to be caused by a larger number of male students in the remedial score range.”

Hackett said boys outperformed girls in nine schools in 2024, up from six schools in 2023.

The division’s planning co-ordinator Bobby Andrews and technical adviser Ann Natasha Second also spoke.