Education Minister Priya Manickchand
The 2024 National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) results will be announced today.
However, the Ministry of Education published a notice on Tuesday which emphasised that results will be withheld for pupils who have not returned or replaced loaned textbooks.
The exercise of returning educational materials is in keeping with the ministry’s textbook policy, which states, “Learners must return books before Progress Reports/Examination Results/ Recommendations/References are uplifted.”
According to the ministry, the policy has to be enforced to ensure that adequate textbooks and similar opportunities are given to the next batch of graduating students and while the ministry caters to a small amount of damage, “it is a very expensive enterprise to give everybody textbooks”.
Government has mandated that all students must have access to the required textbooks for all subjects, and as a result, a total of 619,060 textbooks were procured for the primary and secondary levels at a cost of $3.3 billion in 2023 while 502,072 textbooks will be purchased in 2024 at a cost of $3 billion.
As a result, defaulting pupils from Grades Six and 11 will be unable to access their results online or by slip.
In fact, the ministry has advised that “if a student has misplaced a textbook, then he or she is required to replace the book rather than paying the cost for the book, Original textbooks must be replaced by original textbooks”.
The 2024 NGSA results announcement will be live-streamed on the Education Ministry’s Facebook page today.
A total of 15,488 pupils wrote this year’s NGSA on May 2 and 3. The pupils were tested in English Language, Mathematics, Social Studies and Science.
Additionally, the same measures will apply to students who wrote the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) May/June examinations and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE).
