EDITORIAL - Call in the receivers, Mr Thwaites

When firms fall into trouble, prudent directors usually insist on a rescue plan, for which they hold managers, presuming they survive, accountable. Sometimes the severity of the problem means that a receiver is called in and/or the enterprise has to be liquidated.

Indeed, variations of the process are applied to other kinds of institutions, including schools, although not yet in Jamaica. For instance, this week, the school inspectorate agency for England, Ofsted, placed five schools in the West Midlands city of Birmingham in so-called 'special measures', having found them to be underperforming academically during its probe of an alleged Trojan Horse attempt by Islamists to take over 21 schools in the city. Another 11 schools will be subject to heightened inspections and support because of concerns over student safety and undue influence of school governors over their day-to-day operations.

FEAR OF FANATICISM

Usually, though, it's not fear of religious fanaticism or ideological extremism that causes Ofsted to go so far as to place schools under special management. That tends to happen when pupils are not receiving quality education and the leaders and management of their schools have not demonstrated either the capacity or will to effect a turnaround.

At the end of the 2012-13 fiscal year, of the approximately 220,000 schools in England, Ofsted had 456 in special measures, having caused 96 to be closed and judged 152 others to have improved during the year. Another 127 schools were deemed to have demonstrated serious weaknesses and were on improvement plans.

We have drawn attention to the Ofsted model, and the related English data, given the problem of failing schools in Jamaica and the seeming absence of a robust initiative for confronting the issue. The latest manifestation of the crisis is contained in a report by the education think tank, EducateJamaica.org, that, essentially, repeats its finding from last year's survey of education outcomes from Jamaica's secondary schools. Of the 161 schools reviewed, only a quarter (41) had students passing five Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) secondary education subjects at a single sitting. They represent fewer than 20 per cent of all the students who sit the exams. At many schools, the pass rate was below three per cent, and that is after nearly a third of the cohort who entered the secondary system at grade one had either dropped out before grade 11, or screened out of the exams.

DEEP CRISIS

But we need not rely only on the CXC results to understand the depth of the crisis. The education ministry's own inspectorate of schools, which has developed its own baseline data, has found that students at nearly 80 per cent of the schools it reviews perform below benchmark standards. Only at 46 per cent of schools is the leadership deemed to be satisfactory. Not good, or outstanding. At 46 per cent, the management of the institutions is below par. In even this systemic crisis, there are pockets of poor performance that make the rest appear to be beacons of success.

Yet we dance around the problem. The education minister doesn't want even the worst of the worse to be referred to as what they are: failing schools. And the teachers' union resists even the most benign efforts to hold its members, including head teachers, accountable for the rot.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Apply the Ofsted model.

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