THE Ministry of Education is hoping that the implementation of its transformation project will push the mean score of the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) to 85 per cent by 2015.

This will include emphasising literacy and numeracy at the grade four level before students advance to higher grades.

Presently, the mean score - an average of the national averages by subject - is 54.4 per cent, but the plan is to increase it incrementally by five percentage points each year.
"The task force has set a target that the mean score by 2015 ought to be 85 per cent," Ruel Reid, advisor to the education minister, told the Observer yesterday.

"But we have to bear in mind that the transformation implementation is behind target, so any fall off in those figures ought to be taken in that context," he said.

The results for the 2008 sitting of the exam, published last week, showed that the national averages for Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts and Communication Tasks were 54.6, 52.3, 55.8, 52.6 and 56.7 per cent, respectively.

The figures showed a marginal improvement over last year's averages - 46.0, 52.1, 51.1, 48.3 and 65.8 for the five subjects - but chief education officer Jasper Lawrence said that the mean scores were not ideal for determining the real success of students.

"We can't just look at the raw figures (because) we don't know how many are doing badly," he said. "It's the mean score, so more than half the students could be performing below that mark. There has been some improvement, but how many of our students are doing well? How many are ready for the secondary curriculum?

"Probably what we need to focus on is the number of students performing at or below a certain score and what we need to concern ourselves with is to reduce the number of students who are not ready for the secondary system," he said.

The education ministry, he added, was in the process of establishing minimum standards for secondary readiness.
"...And not until everybody is over that threshold should we be satisfied (with the GSAT grades)," he said.
Lawrence said every student should be performing at the level that they are guaranteed a place in any of the three schools they choose.

"Everybody can get 90 or 100 in a subject and the system would be able to accommodate all of them. ...It's not so much where they are placed but that they are ready for secondary education," he said.

The quality of scores going into individual schools was not available yesterday but Reid, who is also the principal of Jamaica College in Kingston, told the Observer that on a whole the averages for traditional high schools were "qualitatively quite high" and that non-traditional schools were receiving "top-level" students too.