Grade seven students at Holy Trinity High School in Kingston and Newell High in St Elizabeth are benefitting from an intervention aimed at strengthening their skills in literacy and numeracy.

The Grade 7 Academy, which is spearheaded by St Michael’s College in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, offers an adjusted curriculum focusing on remedial reading, writing and numeracy.

Its objective is to ensure that by the end of the school year, a minimum of 70 per cent of students are brought up to at least grade six literacy and numeracy standards, attaining the proficiency required to engage with the traditional high school curriculum in their second year.

Addressing the official launch at Holy Trinity High on Thursday, January 23, Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon said the need to address the matter of literacy and numeracy among students is urgent.

“This type of intensive work that you’re doing complements what we’re trying to do in the Ministry in other areas. I applaud the ministry team too, even before me, for being flexible; for saying we need to do things differently,” she said.

The Grade 7 Academy began at Holy Trinity High in September 2024, and at Newell High in January.
The programme relies on the teacher establishment provided by the ministry, with some adjusting of duties to focus on the special literacy and mathematics curriculum. It includes character education to cultivate positive social skills and ethical values among the students.

Instructional Leader, Dr Faith Alexander, said although the programme is in its early phase, several assessments have been conducted and the results are encouraging. The data shows that over 52 per cent of students at Holy Trinity have improved by at least half of a grade level, with 11 per cent showing improvement between 0.6 and 1.5-grade levels and a further 12 per cent improvement over 1.5 grade levels and above.

Principal, Father Carl Clarke, shared that over the years, more than 75 per cent of students who transition to the institution were reading at or below the grade four level. “We have embarked on several programmes to arrest this. Before the Grade 7 Academy, we introduced an academic intervention programme. We sought to arrest the literacy issue by ensuring that at the grade seven level, every class was exposed to 10 sessions of language, that’s 400 minutes each week – and 400 minutes of mathematics,” he said.

Father Clarke expressed gratitude to the various partners and the Ministry for the support provided in facilitating the Grade 7 Academy, pointing out that, “we truly, truly appreciate it”.