Plan undermines education system

The National Letters

I DISPROVE of the Government’s plan to support the school of excellence.
This will also includes:

  • Identifying the top five per cent of students to study in overseas universities; and,
  • Identifying the top five percent of students from foreign universities to pursue postgraduate studies requires an urgent review to include both the school of excellence and the provincial secondary schools.

For someone in the management or ministerial level to make such a derogatory comment only makes a mockery out of the country’s education system in its entirety.
The plan unquestionably undermines the quality of learning and teaching delivered in our secondary schools, and rigorously defeats the whole purpose of its establishment.
It is as if the Education Department or Department of Higher Education Research Science and Technology reckons that our secondary schools have been producing rubbish in the last 20 years.
On the issues of online selection of grade 10 students to pursue year 11 and 12 education at the school of excellence in this year, I as a parent need to know the selection criteria used to identify best-performing students to enrol in the school of excellence.
I am equally concerned because one of my children attending a secondary school in the nation’s capital scored all “distinctions”, but only to be denied by the online selection process, despite Port Moresby National High School being my child’s first preference.
Constant media publicity on the online selection awareness in recent months has been more akin to a thunder without rain.
Imagine, when a student meeting all the required GPAs that qualifies him/her to enrol at a university or to enrol in the school of excellence with all “distinctions” is being denied.
Something has gone wrong somewhere – quite fishy and mistrustful.
I hope the people responsible would make the same media
awareness on the online selection discrepancies, and how best they would rectify to prevent recurrence in the later years.

Ken Nandawa
Rokunerepe Areke