The Learning Losses of the COVID Pandemic

As the 2021 school year is coming to an end, the Ministry of Education has conducted an assessment on the learning loss during COVID. And the test suggests that students are not where they are supposed to be and the learning gap was hardest felt on core subject areas, including Mathematics, English and Science. Today, Minister of Education Francis Fonseca confirmed with the media the results of the Belize Diagnostic Assessment Test, better known as B-DAT.

Francis Fonseca

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education

“Generally, those assessment tests are establishing very clearly that our children have fallen behind particularly in the areas of math, science and English. Those are three critically important areas. So there is a lot of work to do. It’s no surprise to us; we knew that. We just wanted to really validate that sense that we had with data and information and we’ve done that.”

Reporter

“Have schools been instructed to promote children to the next grade no matter what the stage of their education is right now?”

Francis Fonseca

“No absolutely not. Absolutely not. No. No. In fact in many schools across the country, we are talking now primary schools, in many schools across the country, students will have to repeat and do an additional year. And it is also true for the secondary level; in lesser numbers. But no such instructions. We would not engage in that; that would be foolish, it would be misguided. We have to understand where our students are, what they have lost and we have top work on addressing those gaps that have been identified.”