Grade 4 Literacy Test Results by Next Week

The Ministry of Education has disclosed that 71 per cent of students who sat the Grade Four Literacy Test in June achieved mastery in the examination.
Speaking at a press conference at the Ministry of Education Tuesday (August 11), Education Minister, Hon. Andrew Holness, said the results will be made available to schools by next week Thursday.
This is the first year that the Ministry has administered the test nationally, and Mr. Holness said the level of confidence in the results was “far greater than it was before.” However, the Education Minister expressed concerns about the disparity in results between private and public schools.
“When you disaggregate the data into public and private schools, private schools are 93 percent mastery..but when you look at the public schools, they are 67 percent. It is a vast gap between public and private,” he lamented.
Mr. Holness also said that he was hopeful that more students will achieve mastery in the test, when the supplemental exam is administered in December, as about 25 per cent had achieved near mastery in the last sitting.
However, he is urging parents to play their role in ensuring the literacy of their children.
“Literacy is not just a function of the school. Literacy is more so a function of the values of the family, and what we are discovering is that parents are not paying enough attention to the development of literacy in their children,” he noted.
In the meantime Mr. Holness announced that the results of the Grade Four Literacy Test will be published in the Press, after they are released to schools. He said they will include a contextual analysis of the schools’ performances.
He elaborated that the contextual information would look at things like the size of the school and classes, and the pupil to teacher ratio.
“So that the nation can have a balanced view of the performance of the schools,” Mr. Holness concluded.