Another SEA, another trauma

ON APRIL 10, the 2025 edition of the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination was held nationwide.

More than 17,000 children sat the examination at 547 exam centres, facing a test that will define the quality of their secondary-school education, the way they are socialised and the friends and connections they will make as they mature into early adulthood.

It is not an examination. It is a life-defining moment for most of these children and their lives will be enhanced, improved, or diminished by the results of a single examination on a single day.

In the May 2019 issue of UWI's Today, Jerome Des Lisle, PhD, education, worried about the false positives and negatives of the exam, the shadow education system of extra lessons it fuels and described the exam as "a very weak tool."

"Can it tell you what you want it to tell you?" he asked then. "Is this education, putting up barriers for children?"

Despite the Ministry of Education's announcement that 407 students in Trinidad and 29 in Tobago had been given special-needs concessions, one father had to threaten legal action to get an aide for his 13-year-old child to prepare for and sit the exam.

What happens to children whose parents don't have the means or even the energy to launch a legal challenge to the state? At its most basic level, the exam is a selection process meant to identify students by their academic potential. While any family can choose any secondary school as a first or second choice, it's "prestige" schools that fill these slots.

But only 2,000 of the 17,000 candidates will be accommodated by these schools, most of them government-assisted denominational schools that operate under the 65-year-old Concordat with the state.

These schools are often held to be evidence of an unfair education system that privileges their students, but what's really needed is a commitment to raise state-run schools to the level of state-assisted schools.

Evolving beyond the SEA will not be easy. Barbados announced plans to end the exam in 2019 but will convene the Barbados Secondary Schools Entrance Examination in May.

Ideally, students approaching secondary-school age would have been continuously assessed, their strengths and weaknesses evaluated and be ready to choose schools according to their talent profile.

Instead, the SEA is a race to perceived academic opportunity, leaving 15,000 students to be placed at "good," "weak" and "at-risk" state schools.

Students are divvied up among them through a mix of strategic pre-selection, exam scores and geographic proximity to their homes.

What this process is intended to achieve, it manifestly fails to do. Many challenged students struggle with a curriculum that treats all students as if they had achieved equally.

The relevance of our existing curriculum is being called into question by rapidly advancing technology, and changes should acknowledge the differing abilities of the students it is meant to serve.