Minister not submitting her resignation over pre-test mess up Loop Barbados

Black Immigrant Daily News

With some members of society calling for heads to roll in light of the recent data collection breach in some five secondary schools in Barbados, the Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training (METVT) Kay McConney does not believe that she needs to walk away from her post.

“I never anticipated. I never thought to resign,” she said.

The Minister said that it was a case where the Ministry was too trusting.

She explained:

“What often happens is that partners enter into agreements to implement projects all times. There are times when there’s trust between partners that if one partner says x should be done and the partner has responsibility for doing x we expect that they would follow through.

“What happened here? What I believe, not what I believe, what I know is that an error was made where the removal of questions was not done, and you would have seen that in the press release done by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and our officers have also said that they ought to have been more diligent in checking to make sure that what they trusted was real.”

And though confessing that as minister she does not see all tests or surveys that go into the nation’s schools, she stood her ground on not handing in her resignation at this time.

“These matters are normally handled at a technical level. I do not see forms or surveys or questionnaires that go out for every single project that exists within our school system. It’s just impossible. There are so many, and so I never thought that it would have been necessary for me to resign. I thought it would have been necessary for us as a ministry to review the situation and to put what is necessary to be put in place in order for us to move forward and continue to do better.”

The METVT/IDB Code Caribbean Instrument, previously termed the Computer Science pre-test, was administered to some 733 minors in Barbados before the plug was pulled after public outcry this week on Tuesday, October 4, 2022. The students who answered the two-hour long survey attended the St George Secondary School, Princess Margaret Memorial School, Graydon Sealy Secondary School, Queen’s College and Coleridge & Parry Secondary School.

NewsAmericasNow.com