A school review is taking place in Anguilla by a number of senior education officials assisted by a visiting educator from the Isle of Wight, Gary Booth, and in consultation with the Principals of the Schools.
Chief Education Officer, Mrs. Rhonda Connor, is one of the local officials involved in the review. She spoke to The Anguillian about the work. “The School Review focuses on what is happening at each of the schools in terms of four particular areas,” she explained. “These are: the quality of teaching and learning; student achievement; safety and behaviour; and quality of leadership.”
She continued: “We, as the Department of Education, need to know on an on-going basis how our schools are performing and how our children are doing. It is also a requirement of the Education Act for us to review our schools. We will be meeting with our Principals and Deputy Principals to report orally and then a full report will be given to the schools. After that, the schools will be required to use the information, celebrate successes and put together an action plan where there is room for improvement.
“The Education Act requires us to engage in school inspection periodically. We have with us our consultant, Mr. Gary Booth, an Education Officer, from theIsle of Wight, and he has been working with us on a number of projects in the past. Just recently, he worked on the Math Workshop and we are happy to have him back leading the process. We also have two of our retired Education Officers, Mrs. Verna Fahie and Mrs. Rosena Brooks, as well as the Education Officers.
Mrs. Connor pointed out that the school review process involved a number of steps. In the first place, the Principals were engaged in a school self-evaluation exercise. “They looked at their strengths and the areas for improvement,” she said. “We also canvassed the views of parents and students on questionnaires which they completed and brought back to us and which we analysed. A significant portion of our time was spent in the schools observing our students in the classrooms. We were engaged in work scrutiny, looking at teachers’ planning documents and other records.”
Mr. Booth said that school inspections were a large part of the education system in the United Kingdom for the past fifteen years. “In the UK, our schools are inspected every three years and judgments are made about the four areas of which Mrs. Connor spoke about here in Anguilla,” he stated. “We in the UK would say that the improvement in the schools has been the result of the accountability that is now expected of them due to the inspection regime. However, the inspections in the UK are conducted by external inspectors who are not part of the Isle of Wight’s education personnel.
“Here in Anguilla, the difficulty, in some ways, is that the review of schools is conducted by the same people who are supporting them – the schools. This is a school review: not an inspection. What we are trying to ensure is that the officers who have been reviewing the schools are not the same persons, but the critical friends or link officers of the schools. Once the review is complete, it will be for the link officer then to take the action plan for improvement forward.”
So far, the Orealia Kelly Primary School, the Morris Vanterpool Primary School and the Workshop Initiative for Support in Education (WISE), a section of the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School, were reviewed last week. The on-going plan is for all schools in Anguilla to be reviewed in the course of this academic year.
