PDF

Basic information about the School

King Weston All Age School was established on its present site in 1970. It is located in the district of King Weston in the hills of west rural St. Andrew which border on the parish of St Mary. It has an enrolment of 42 students, although it has a capacity for 260. There are four class teachers and the student teacher ratio is 11:1. Students in Grades 2 and 3 and Grades 5 and 6 are placed in multi-grade classes. The average daily attendance for students is 95 per cent. The school now provides for primary school students only, since it no longer has Grades 7 to 9 students. The school was founded by the Roman Catholics in 1868 and the church continues to play a supportive role in the school’s development. The school serves the neighbouring communities such as Mount Cheerful, Belmont, and Florence Hill. The motto of the school is, ‘Only the Best is Good Enough.’

Overall effectiveness of the school

King Weston All Age School is a satisfactory school

Leadership and management are satisfactory. The principal has positive relationships with the staff but instructional leadership is more limited, especially in regard to holding staff accountable for teaching and student performance. Teachers are included in school self-evaluation. However, the Improvement Plan for this school year is lacking in detail and success criteria. The school benefits from an effective and visible Board led by a committed chairman. The principal has a respectful, supportive relationship with parents and the local community. The school has an active and supportive Parent Teacher Association (PTA).

Teaching and learning is satisfactory. However, while teachers’ know their subjects, they are less secure on how best to teach the subjects to their students. Teaching too often involves the teacher talking for too long a period of time with students not being active and participating sufficiently. The delivery of the curriculum is unsatisfactory with limited formal review and adaptation to meet the needs of all the students.

Students’ performance in English at Grade 4 is good, but performance at Grade 6 is unsatisfactory in English and mathematics. Students make satisfactory progress in both English and mathematics throughout the school.
Students’ attitudes towards school and their behaviour in school are good. They also show good civic and spiritual awareness. However, they are less aware of the economy of Jamaica and environmental issues, both locally and globally, and their economic and environmental understanding is unsatisfactory.

Human resources are satisfactory; material resources are good in both quantity and quality. Teachers make good use of the resources available to them to enhance their teaching and students’ learning. The overhead projectors, DVD, charts and textbooks are frequently used in lessons. However, there are very few extracurricular activities.

Security, health, safety and well-being are satisfactory. However, there are safety hazards in the student bathrooms requiring immediate attention. The school compound is securely fenced and students feel safe at school. The well-being of students is a priority for all staff and the good relationships between all staff and students creates a supportive family atmosphere in the school.

The countries featured in this volume have well-developed and effective systems for recruiting, preparing, developing, and retaining teachers and school leaders. Comparisons between countries are valuable for a number of reasons. First, they broaden the view of what is possible. Too often, policymakers remain stuck with conventional ideas, bound by precedents in their own context, and are unable to see options that might be available and successful. By providing policymakers with an expanded view of the policy choices that might be available, comparisons can expand the toolbox. Second, international comparisons show how ideas work in practice at the system level. By exploring other systems in depth, policymakers can see what the implementation challenges are, how other nations dealt with them, and what remains to be solved. Such explorations can help enable policymakers put in place new policies with a clearer eye.

The Snapshot of School Management Effectiveness (SSME) developed under the USAID EdData II project offers an approach to assessing primary student performance at the same time that it evaluates school management and governance factors that are strongly associated with school effectiveness and learning achievement. A single person can gather data in one school during a one-day visit, and just enough schools are sampled to give donors and governments a fast, inexpensive, yet reliable and statistically valid scan of school management at a given level
of interest. The SSME also provides principals, teaching staff, and parents with a mechanism for voicing their concerns to the Ministry of Education.

The instruments that constitute the SSME were applied in 48 Jamaican primary schools in six parishes during the period May 29 to June 15, 2007. In each of the 48 schools, two classes (a grade 2 and a grade 3) and their two teachers were observed and interviewed. Two boys and two girls from each class were interviewed—making a total of 8 students from each school. In all, 48 principals, 96 teachers and classrooms, 384 students, and 47 parents provided information for the study. Observations were also made of the school compound and the classrooms.

This book is about the threats to education quality that cannot be explained by lack of resources. It reviews service delivery failures in education: cases where programs and policies increase inputs to education but do not produce effective services where it counts – in the classroom. It documents what we know about the extent and costs of such failures. It argues that a root cause of low-quality and inequitable public services is the weak accountability of providers to both their supervisors and clients.

 The central focus of the book is that countries are increasingly adopting innovative strategies to attack these problems. Drawing on new evidence from 22 rigorous evaluations in 11 countries, this book examines how strategies to strengthen accountability relationships in school systems have affected schooling outcomes.

The book provides a succinct review of the rationale and impact evidence for three key lines of reform: (1) policies that use the power of information to strengthen the ability of students and their parents to hold providers accountable for results; (2) policies that promote schools’ autonomy to make key decisions and control resources; and (3) teacher incentives reforms that specifically aim at making teachers more accountable for results.