Yesterday students across the country found out how they did on the Primary School Selection Examinations. What was the national average and did it exceed last year's 53%? Who were the top finishers, and which schools did best and worst? Tonight, those questions have no answers because the Ministry of Education's testing unit is not releasing any information, breaking a long tradition of transparency and open-ness.
This year, the Ministry of Education is pursuing a new media strategy where all the aggregate information will be released at a press conference tomorrow morning. So tonight, while we may not know how Belize's primary school finishers fared in the exam, today Minister of Education Francis Fonseca did tell us that overall our students are doing marginally better, but the scores are still not encouraging.
Hon. Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"What I can say to you today is that we continue to face tremendous challenges in education. Again the national performance averages are unsatisfactory in view. Particularly in math and science we continue to not do well. In terms of social studies and language we are doing better than we did in the past but its still not satisfactory and we still have a lot of work to do in that area."
Alfonso Noble,
In terms of the overall picture did we better or worse this year?
Hon. Francis Fonseca,
"We did better on math, we did a little better on science, about the same on social studies, and about the same on language. They will release the official results tomorrow. There are marginal changes in the results so I am still definitely not satisfied with the results."
As we said, well have the full, detailed results in tomorrow night's newscast.
