The Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information will roll out its new Curriculum Instruction and Assessment (CIA) roadmap in September of this year.

Director of Regional Educational Services, Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, Region One (Kingston and St. Andrew), Otis Brown, who made the disclosure, said under the initiative, the Ministry will be providing special resources for teachers to improve their pedagogical approaches to improve student academic performance.

“We want, first of all, to have our teachers better empowered in the matters pertaining to the curriculum. In Jamaica, we are using the National Standards Curriculum (NSC). Under this (CIA) programme, what we want to do is to provide some road maps for children at different grade levels. We plot that trajectory for the children at different grade levels to assist our teachers to use different approaches to help them to improve academically as they move through school,” he explained.

Brown was addressing journalists during a tour of the Franklyn Town Primary School in Kingston, with Education, Skills, Youth and Information Minister, Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon; and Member of Parliament for Central Kingston, Donovan Williams, on May 29.

Key subject areas targeted under the initiative are Mathematics, English Language, Literacy, and Language Arts.

Under the programme, which spans all grade levels, Brown said educators and students will be provided with resources to address learning gaps.

In addition, regular assessments will be conducted to identify weaknesses and to formulate strategies to improve student performance in these areas.

“We do not want our schools to be operating with the conveyor belt sort of attitude where we move children from one grade level on to the next. Under the CIA road map, at intervals in each academic year, the children are going to be tested, and based on the results of the test that we administer, we will then put intervention programmes in place within the schools to assist them to improve,” Mr. Brown said.

Notably, he pointed out that the initiative will seek to develop individual learning plans for children who have special needs and give specialised attention to [these children to assist them to] do better academically.

“This is going to be done in conjunction with a number of departments in the Ministry working together. For example, the special needs department, that is the department we will be using to assist us to write those individual learning plans and to develop specialised resources that children may need [depending] on the results from the tests that will be administered throughout the school year,” he explained.