Major Improvement in English Language Pass Rate at Kemps Hill High

With support from the National School Learning and Intervention Plan (NSLIP), the Clarendon-based Kemps Hill High School registered a 32 per cent improvement in English Language, in the 2025 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination.

The NSLIP, aimed at improving Mathematics and English Language in high schools, was instituted by the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information to deal with COVID-19 learning loss through extra lessons, summer school, digital tools, and psychosocial support, using a bottom-up approach with school-level plans.

In the recent CSEC test, the school improved from 24 per cent to 56 per cent in English Language, and Mathematics moved from 29.4 per cent to 31.2 per cent.

Principal, Karen Charlton Boothe, tells JIS News that they employed a “tactical approach” recommended by the Ministry and did some changes to the timetable.

“So, instead of the regular sessions, we extend the sessions to five hours per week for Maths and English. We also have extended school, extra classes, morning classes, evening classes, and online classes,” the Principal outlines.

There is also additional teaching time during holidays, extra lessons, homework programmes, psychosocial and parental engagement, strict attendance monitoring, provision of digital learning resources, a robust accountability framework, and a focus on customised learning, based on assessment data.

“Teachers will go to class with their kits; they have calculators, they have graph papers, everything that a student would need. So, the students don’t have any reason to leave the class or say that they don’t have the materials,” Mrs. Charlton Boothe says.

She notes that all the support from everyone, all the teachers coming together, and working with individual students, resulted in the increase.

“It was a sigh of relief to say yes, we can achieve, because you know that underachievement, it really affects the teachers,” the Principal shares.

“The success helps boost the school; it helps the students; it helps the teachers’ morale and all of that and lifts the standard of the school,” she says, noting that most of her students come from primary schools on the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) Pathway 3, and the teachers worked hard for this “great improvement”.

The Principal tells JIS News that the teachers are committed, and they really want the students to learn, so it is not about the money.

“I just want to commend the teachers, the entire staff, from the ancillary to the admin to the academic staff; they are doing a wonderful job. I have geniuses here, and I would really want that to be documented. The teachers really go above and beyond,” she says.

The Principal reports that the school is getting transfers from several schools across the parish, and that students are choosing Kemps Hill High as their first choice in the PEP exam.

“One of our initiatives is to have our school tour day, where we ask the primary schools around the area to come in – our feeder schools – and we allow them to tour the school, and be acquainted with the institution,” she says.

“Many persons don’t know that the school is here and don’t know our offerings. Many persons don’t know that these are the things that we are doing with the students, so we have our school tour day. The last one that we had in September, we had over 200 students coming in to tour the school. We started this initiative from 2023, and we have seen improvement where students are choosing Kemps Hill as their first choice,” the Principal tells’.

She emphasises that the growth in the CSEC results is sustainable because based on the plans that they have, such as their reading project, the students will excel, and the teachers have the passion.

“We have a common goal, excellence is where we are going, excellence is what we want to achieve,” she tells JIS News.

Meanwhile, Head of the Language Department, Camille Mantac Parker, says the results were worth celebrating, citing one student who got a grade two in the CSEC exam, who entered the school unable to read.

“We are just going to continue working as a team. When I see that student who could not write a paragraph and we moved her to write such interesting, intriguing stories, I really feel good,” she shares with JIS News.

For Head of the Mathematics Department, Jeneinei Donaldson-Jones, the team members have always been working hard, and although the “exciting news might look like it is something that has happened over a year, the truth is, it has been happening for a while; it has been in the making”.

“We are all problem-solvers. It doesn’t matter what sphere of life we are in, it is Mathematics that helps us to solve problems,” she says.

Senior Prefect at the school, Shanterlee McLean, who passed seven subjects in CSEC, says entering the institution she faced many academic challenges, but “with the help of my teachers, I eventually conquered the challenges I was facing”.

“I am very proud of my peers, and I am very grateful that we were able to accomplish such a goal. This school is a very good school because of the support that we get from the teachers and persons in the community,” she adds.