Letter of the Day | Will retaining students really help?
Published:Saturday | July 26, 2025 | 12:07 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
For decades, schools have allowed children to advance to the next grade, even when they’re not performing at grade level. The call for holding students back to improve learning challenges has been long met with mixed emotions from different education stakeholders. Recently, the chairman of the Education Transformation Oversight Committee, Adrian Stokes, announced that, “Students who are not at the requisite level will be placed on a pathway that allows them to remediate the learning challenges they are experiencing” and that individual learning plans will be developed for these students to ensure proper targeting of learning challenges. While this may be welcome, there is no doubt that this venture will come with a lot of teething pains and a lot of questions.
While we anticipate the implementation of this venture, it would be great if there were consent nationally on how these issues with students’ literacy development are conducted. The benefit of this venture will not come from the students being retained or held back, but from the services that will be put in place to tackle their needs.
Will this initiative allow for the formal assessment of students and provide teachers with the data needed to identify specific learning challenges? This would seemingly enable teachers to develop individualised learning plans. I believe it is unproductive for teachers to address these issues without knowledge of the specific problem. For instance, a student’s inability to read may not solely indicate a reading difficulty but could stem from other underlying challenges.
Additionally, if this is not taken into consideration, students will still be held back with minimal improvement and will, in turn, be shoved into the secondary school system on a pathway that matches their level but the chances remain that they may not able to function accordingly. There are lot of things to consider so that we get this right in an effort to see noticeable improvement.
As a practising educator, I have believed in a hierarchical structure or one may also identify it as ability grouping where students are arranged based on academic performance. This structure will allow teachers to tailor their instruction or create individual education plans for the specific needs of the students, which may potentially lead to positive outcomes.
While teachers can only control what happens at school, how can we actively involve families in this initiative? More students need to experience a home culture where reading, whether physical or digital, is encouraged. This should not be a school-only effort but a collaborative one that includes families as key stakeholders.
ANDREA DAVIS