Dear Editor,
The reports emerging from Beterverwagting Secondary School in Guyana should concern anyone who takes education policy seriously. What is being described is not a single school in distress, nor a temporary dip in performance. It is the visible consequence of systemic decisions made years earlier, now manifesting at secondary level in the most damaging way possible.
Teachers report that students are entering Grade 7 after eight years of formal schooling unable to read, write, or perform basic numeracy. Secondary-level educators are then expected to deliver subject curricula that assume mastery of foundational skills which many students never acquired. When those same students later struggle at CSEC level, the burden of explanation is placed squarely on the secondary schools and their teachers.
This framing is fundamentally flawed:
Learning is progressive and cumulative. Literacy and numeracy are not optional skills that can be skipped and later recovered without consequence. When a child fails to grasp these fundamentals in the early years, every subsequent grade compounds the deficit. Passing a student through the system as though mastery has occurred does not resolve the problem, it conceals it temporarily and magnifies it later.
What we are witnessing now is therefore not an abrupt collapse. It is the predictable outcome of unresolved learning gaps carried forward year after year, until they surface in a setting no longer designed to address them.
This brings us to an unavoidable policy question: promotion practice:
Public discourse in Guyana has long associated the “No Child Left Behind” approach with automatic or near-automatic promotion. While the stated intention of such policies is often to reduce stigma and dropout, progression without mastery, when not paired with guaranteed remediation, produces precisely the conditions educators are now describing.
Let me be clear: this is not an argument for punitive repetition or exclusion. International evidence shows that indiscriminate grade retention can worsen inequality. However, promotion without structured, system-funded remediation is equally damaging. Equity in progression must be matched by equity in instructional support.
A credible promotion framework requires three things:
clear mastery benchmarks at key transition points; guaranteed remedial pathways for learners who fall below those benchmarks; and institutional accountability at the stage where learning gaps first emerge not years later when secondary schools inherit them.
Absent these safeguards, promotion becomes an administrative act divorced from learning reality. Secondary schools are then expected to remediate primary-level deficits while being judged against standards that assume those deficits never existed. That is not accountability. It is policy incoherence.
Equally troubling are reports that teachers face pressure to “work with” students on School-Based Assessments in ways that blur the line between support and grade inflation. If true, this points to a deeper problem: the prioritisation of statistics over truth. Education systems cannot be reformed through managed data. Honest assessment is not an inconvenience; it is the foundation of effective intervention.
There is also a dimension that cannot be ignored: poverty, nutrition, and home learning environments:
Global evidence is unequivocal. Hunger, malnutrition, unstable housing, and economic stress impair concentration, memory, language development, and attendance. A child who comes to school hungry or exhausted is biologically disadvantaged before instruction even begins. No amount of supervision, audits, or performance targets can compensate for that reality.
If students are struggling academically, governments have a responsibility to ask not only how they are being taught, but under what conditions they are expected to learn. This requires more than anecdote. It requires data.
A serious response would therefore include a national diagnostic survey examining the relationship between learning outcomes and household income, food security, parental literacy, housing conditions, and student absenteeism. Without understanding the socio-economic context of underperformance, policy responses risk addressing symptoms while ignoring causes.
Throughout all of this, one point must be stated plainly: secondary teachers did not create this problem. They are confronting its accumulated effects. Expecting subject specialists to deliver advanced curricula, remediate years of foundational deficits, and produce examination success without specialist support, retraining, or reduced class sizes, is neither reasonable nor evidence-based.
Accountability without capacity is not accountability. It is abdication:
The children affected by these failures do not belong to any one school or ministry. They are a national responsibility. If governments continue to prioritise procedural compliance over structural reform, another generation will exit the education system without the skills required for work, citizenship, or dignity while official reports continue to claim success.
Education systems do not fail suddenly. They fail gradually, one unaddressed deficit at a time.
Teachers are not the problem:They are the last line of defence.