By Abass Jalloh
The Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, Dr. David Moinina Sengeh has said that the government will be constructing another new set of 100 classrooms for both junior and senior secondary schools across Sierra Leone.
Dr. Sengeh made the disclosure yesterday 14th July 2022 at the weekly press briefing hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communications, stating that this is in addition to the new 100 classrooms for schools they partnered to build, including hostels in Port Loko and Kenema.
He said 60 classrooms will be constructed for pre-primary schools apart from the ongoing renovation of the other classrooms across the country.
The minister said by the end of next year they would have constructed about 327 classrooms in the country.
“We launch the performance-based financing recently where we are giving over a Million Dollars to primary schools in addition to subsidies, and we are going to give them renovation grants as well, which would be hundreds of thousands of dollars this rainy season,” the minister said.
He disclosed that “every chiefdom now has an examination centre”, recalling that before now, pupils had to travel from one village to the other to take their exams.
Talking about the just- released primary school-leaving exam (NPSE), Dr. Sengeh stated that the results published this year are the “earliest ever in the history of Sierra Leone”, adding that the children and parents have two months to prepare for the reopening of the new academic year starting September.
In terms of the high-level statistics, he said, this is the best result over the years in the history of Sierra Leone. “Best result is how many children who passed,” he said, adding that there were over one hundred and sixty thousand pupils who took the exam, with a pass rate of 81.2% as against last year’s 77%.
“In terms of demographics, more women took the exam than boys, and girls pass the exam in terms of numbers than boys as well,” he stated.
“At the regional level, we see there is a high performance from the north, high performance from the east and south. And at the district level, Falaba had well over 91% of their students who took the exam and passed, and 92% of students in Falaba who attempted the exam had above 230 which is the threshold for pass in this country”, he said.
He said the best school for this year is Makeni Talent Academy and that the best performing student Pabs-Garnon Lorraine from International School Ltd who scored the highest with 337 aggregate.
On the aspect of the concept of the T-Score system, the minister said it had always been used in the NPSE, saying that grades of candidates had never been calculated over the five hundred (500) score but that the T-Score system allows a student’s raw score to be calculated based on the average population level of those who took the exam.
Copyright © 2022 Politico Online (15/07/22)
