Queen’s College Principal Dr. David Browne.
With schools now partially reopened for students with the most pressing assessments ahead of them, the island’s education system is sailing in uncharted waters. After secondary schools opened last week for students to complete School-Based Assessments (SBA) and Caribbean Vocational Qualifications (CVQs) and primary schools opening today for Class 4 students, the next few weeks will be closely watched by education officials and members of the public.
However, one educator is looking even beyond that as he weighs all possibilities set to come out of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Principal of Queen’s College Dr. David Browne sat down for a talk with The Barbados Advocate ahead of his institution’s reopening and explained that going forward, things would be very different.
Noting that his school’s roll was currently 1055 students, Dr. Browne said that if there was no change in the situation, there could be no normal resumption of school in September. He did make a suggestion to the Ministry of Education on how to remedy this. “If the virus is still around, there can’t be 1000 children in here. And in most of the secondary schools, Queen’s College, Harrison College, Lodge School Foundation, Combermere are over 1 000. The others are near 900, so I don’t know how you are going to have social distancing with those numbers, but you can have a shift system where half come to school in the morning and half in the evening,” he said.
Going on to state that the online teaching was going better than initially expected, Dr. Browne revealed that there were several hurdles that made the transition a rocky one. “We had the usual problems. We came to know the students who did not have wifi, one or two students who did not have electricity. Then we had our fair share of a lack of instruments but the QC/HC Alumni of New York and Toronto helped out. They donated more than 45 instruments so that everybody was able to get one who did not have one.”
Noting that the lockdown kicked in before everyone could be properly trained in the G Suite and that some teachers were a bit slow to pick it up, Browne added that it was currently working well for his school but that the implementation system needed to be perfected should they be forced to go back to it in September.
Stating that one of the bigger challenges was the number of devices per household versus the number of persons using them, Dr. Browne said that no one could have known that that was going to be one of the most glaring issues. “When the Ministry had asked earlier about instruments, people said that they have laptops, but what nobody could foresee was that with parents working from home, students having to use the laptop caused a real problem. It then became a lack of instruments that no one could have predicted – not that we deliberately did it. We never foresaw that parents would be home using their instrument for their work, students have to be online doing their work as well. Another thing is when we checked, the smartphones were not as smart as we thought either. So they were lacking in many areas. The G-Suite is a very specific platform and some of the smartphones had various problems accessing it.”
With Dr. Browne making his stance on the superiority of classroom instruction over distance teaching very clear, he did say that technology did have its merits and adds value to education. He then revealed that he moved a resolution at a principals’ conference in Jamaica about four years ago to all governments in the region to raise their level of expenditure in technology in education to at least 7%, calling it investment and not expenditure. With only Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and St. Lucia spending on any substantial technology at the time, Dr. Browne said that it was imperative and could have eased the shock experienced by the region’s educational system.
With the 2020 academic year earmarked to come to an end on July 24th, Browne is of the opinion that things should be smoother going forward. “This could have been done better. We could have planned better for it. I knew that this could have happened weeks in advance, but yet when the Ministry announced that we were going on shutdown, we were caught off-guard. A lot of things caught the entire system off-guard. I hope that we learned from this experience and come September, no more surprises. Nothing should surprise us in September. We have all the time to prepare,” he said.