Editorial | Put some pep into PEP

There's a Jamaican salesman of California wines who, on retirement, got into the newspaper circulation business at home. Quoting his old boss, he was fond of telling his field staff that they had to inspect what they expect.

In other words, they not only had to monitor assumptions against outcomes, but be robust in their efforts to achieve their desired ends - that is, increased newspaper sales. We assume the same goes for changing a national school curriculum, with strong support from all stakeholders - policymakers, teachers, parents and students.

Which raises the ongoing controversy over the planned implementation of the so-called Primary Exit Profile (PEP), from next year, to determine the readiness of students for secondary education, and the article in this newspaper on Sunday by Colin Steer, the education ministry's director of communications, insisting on the readiness of teachers to execute the curriculum, or that they should be.

Public discussion of PEP, to replace the 20-year-old Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), has been taking place for at least five years, but, according to Mr Steer, the curriculum upon which it is based has been available since 2016. Since then, Mr Steer says, the ministry has held 18 sensitisation sessions for parents, four for teachers, plus "more than 100 smaller sessions conducted by specialists and education officers, with between 40 and 400 teachers at each".

Yet many teachers and principals of the 800 or so schools to which the PEP curriculum applies, as well as the teachers' union, the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA), say they are not prepared to successfully navigate next year's first cohort of grade-six students through the system.

"The implementation of the PEP element of the National Standard Curriculum is on track to fail," the JTA's president, Garth Anderson, told the association's annual conference in August. "PEP remains a mystery, and teachers, students and parents are still anxious even after several workshops have been held, and the publication of newspaper articles, which have attempted to allay our fears."

Mr Steer's article wouldn't be counted among those to which Dr Anderson referred, but it perhaps provides a clue or two about the ministry's adherence to that fundamental principle that our wine/newspaper salesman insisted on for success in transformational change: inspecting what you expect.

New mindset

Mr Steer concedes that attendance at assessment workshops for school leaders and teachers was "initially tepid".

"It is not until the actual presentation of the PEP performance task pilots in June 2018 that more teachers appreciated that this was not going to be the usual multiple-choice-type exams and that students would be required, in some instances, to explain, or justify, their answers," he writes. "That requires a whole new mindset."

This failure rests with teachers and principals. But the greater blame rests with the education ministry, which, ultimately, is accountable to the hundreds of thousands of students whose lives will be affected by the quality of the implementation of the new curriculum. The inadequacy of the grasp by teachers of the elements of PEP shouldn't only have been apparent to the education ministry this past June. Not if it is seriously inspecting what it expected.

From all accounts, PEP is designed to do what GSAT was supposed to deliver, but failed to accomplish - critical thinking among students, whose future wouldn't be determined by a single exam, and whose preparation and readiness for secondary education would be on the basis of continuous assessment. The stakes are too high and the risks too great for a reckless flutter on this one. Maybe all parties should step back a bit for a frank dialogue on how, and when, to proceed.

Indeed, but for the recent controversy around PEP, we are surprised by the absence of intensity of public education on something so critically important.