NEI: Coronavirus education data gathering crucial

Western Bureau:

Maureen Dwyer, the chief inspector at the National Education Inspectorate (NEI), says she was surprised at the call for a delay in inspecting schools during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. She was speaking during a recent Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) meeting, where she noted that now is the best time for critical data gathering.

“What we are simply doing is recording, suggesting, and making sure that there is an adequate supply of data. We could not allow the Ministry of Education to make policies without data, so I am really surprised at this, as the JTA never directly raised it with me,” Dwyer told The Gleaner in an interview.

“We have never had a pandemic before, certainly not in my lifetime, but we have to record and see what difficulty we have in the system. We have to see what works, and we have to put it there in history for the next generation, so that if anything like this happens again, we have something on record to show what happened,” added Dwyer.

During last Wednesday’s half-yearly meeting of the JTA’s Westmoreland parish chapter via Zoom, Owen Speid, the JTA’s immediate past president, criticised the NEI for what he called its insensitive approach to inspecting schools at a time when teachers are grappling with the effects of the pandemic on the education system.

Spreading of the virus

“We believe that the NEI should hold off on all inspections at this time, and we believe that it is insensitive to be having inspections at this time, under the conditions in which our teachers are now operating and the threat levels experienced by them in trying to cope with the spreading of the virus,” Speid said at the time. “We are almost at the point where, if they persist, we are going to be saying to our member schools that they should maybe not respond to anything sent to them by the NEI.”

But in outlining the NEI’s adjusted mandate for continuing the education process amid the pandemic, Dwyer stressed that her organisation collaborates with educators about what teaching methods do or do not work during the pandemic.

“Our teachers are integral to everything in education in Jamaica, so the NEI would never do anything to bring our teachers any kind of anxiety or to discombobulate them as they carry out their work. We are now learning, along with our teachers, about what works and what we may need to do a little better or a little differently,” said Dwyer.

In giving his take on the situation, current JTA President Jasford Gabriel said that the NEI’s inspections are coming at a time when some teachers have still not been fully trained in conducting virtual classes.

“Given that all our stakeholders, our teachers especially, are still trying to get adjusted to this new norm in terms of online teaching and learning, plus the fact that teachers are still being trained – and there are some teachers who have still not received any training – it is quite disturbing to all our members that their classrooms are going to be visited, because they have been asked to submit their codes,” said Gabriel.

“It also has implications as far as the fairness and objectivity of the process would be concerned, because these ratings would be compared with those that would have been done under normal times. We would expect that the schools would also have been given the opportunity to do the usual self-assessment that has always been very integral to the process, and the NEI would have been guided in a significant way by the results of the self-assessment done by the schools,” added Gabriel.

The NEI was formed following a recommendation from the National Task Force on Educational Reform’s 2004 report that a national quality assurance authority should be established to address performance and accountability in the education system.