New Education Standard ready for new school term

The government has officially released their first national standard criteria for judging schools. Its aim is to streamline how schools are assessed academically.
Cayman 27’s Jevaughnie Ebanks has more in this report.

The Office of Education Standards has released a new document aimed at prescribing the standards of excellence of education and Director of Educational Standards, Peter Carpenter said its very important.

“Standards our schools we know need to improve and we need to helper young people when they’re graduating from public schools and private schools to reach their very, very best academic standard so they can be successful in their career or future education paths,” said Mr. Carpenter.

The new framework is called successful schools and achieving students and was developed using a wide array of input from stakeholders like parents and those within the education sector. Here’s how it works, the evaluations will have a four-point rating scale, which assesses schools’ progress against the inspirational standards:

-Excellent – exceptionally high quality of performance or practice

-Good – the expected quality of performance or practice

-Satisfactory – the minimum quality of performance and practice.

-Weak – the quality is not yet at the level required for schools in the Cayman Islands. Schools that are rated weak will be expected to take urgent measures to improve the quality of any aspect of their performance or practice that is judged at this level.

“All schools will be inspected more regularly then perhaps has been the case historically so in the past schools have been visited every four years now we are moving to a two year cycle which means that or 50 or so schools and early year centres in the Cayman Islands will be visited at least once in academic year,” said Mr. Carpenter.

Mr. Carpenter said going forward one of the standards to be implemented is the direct input of students in policies and changes that affect them.

The new policy is expected to roll out in the next school year.