“Irresponsible” behaviour in non-return of Grade 6 textbooks – Education Minister

…says it could affect upcoming NGSA students

Education Minister Priya Manickchand has continued calls for textbooks to be returned from the current Grade Six cohort, in order to provide these opportunities for the upcoming batch.
The Education Ministry has implemented a policy whereby students will be unable to access their National Grade Six Assessment results until the books are returned. Each child would have acquired 17 textbooks or materials to aid in their preparation for the examination.

Speaking with media operatives on Friday, the Education Minister said there was a high degree of irresponsible behaviour this year, where a majority of the books were not returned. However, officials would have retrieved a large quantity during a collection exercise.
“I expect every year you’ll get some loss…but what I saw here was lawlessness. It was absolutely irresponsible behaviour because when we walked house to house, we collected them back. Some places moved from 1600 outstanding children. That will be 1600 multiplied by 17 cause each child got 17 books, to under 100. That’s the effort,” said Manickchand.
She underscored that the students in the public sector would have seen tremendous benefits from these resources, and those opportunities must be extended to the other students. She recalled taking office last year at a time when there was a deficit of textbooks. If this trend continues, Guyana will be in that position again.
“For the public school children, it made all the difference in the world. I came into the Ministry and found zero textbooks. I had none to give out and textbooks hadn’t been bought for four years so there was a serious deficit. If I don’t collect this back, by next year we’re back in that status where I can’t give everybody because I don’t have enough to give everybody…It’s not me being mean. I just really, really want to give the other children the opportunity.”
According to the Minister, exceptions will be made where there were genuine setbacks or issues that would have caused students to lose their books.
“If you come and you can’t get the book back and we find out that is a genuine case of somebody spiting somebody and took away the textbooks, we’ll deal with that. But this that we saw, this number, you got entire schools with 60-something children who did not return the books. You want to tell me 60-something children got the same kinds of problems?” she questioned.
Guyana’s mid-year report would have shown that $980.5 million was spent by the Education Ministry to acquire worksheets and textbooks for children in the public school system. Some 165,958 textbooks were procured and distributed to over 13,000 Grade Six students.
The NGSA was written at a time when the country is still facing COVID-19 crises and other effects. However, Manickchand pointed out that it has provided officials with the opportunity to explore ways in which education can be delivered differently.
“Some of this worked for some students. Grade Six classrooms have a tendency to grind children, eight o’clock to six o’clock and then lessons. Is that really what’s necessary? Now that we’ve been home and we could look at this again, is that necessary?… There are things that we learnt here and we have to find ways to engage the children, especially for mathematics.”
She added, “What we did this year is we wrote all the notes that children could need in social studies, science and we printed them and gave them to every single child. So, we cut out that writing from the blackboard and we had more discussion time. I think that’s an effective thing that we can do going forward. We gave worksheets, past papers.”
Speaking on the admission of Grade Six students into the secondary system, the Minister said they are mulling a January reopening.
“What we have done for Grade Seven is the consolidated curriculum so we have already cut the curriculum from 40 weeks to 20 weeks. What we have to do is make sure we cover that as well as work they would have missed in Grade Six.” (G12)