Archive of posts from Saba-News.com Archive Saba News
The Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) will host a two-member team from Saba Comprehensive School for a threeday visit from 10-13 March, writes The Daily Herald. The members of the team are Constance Patricia Clement, Deputy Principal and Department Head of the Academic Stream, and Jill Yearwood, Career Guidance Counsellor at the school.
While on Barbados, the team will hold discussions with officials of CXC on various issues, including examinations administration, school-based assessment, curriculum development, teacher training and professional development, and CXC’s examinations system.
The team will also visit two secondary schools in Barbados, Harrison College and St Leonard’s Boys School. At Harrison College, team members will observe the administration of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), while at St. Leonard’s they will observe both the Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ) and the Caribbean Certificate of Secondary Level Competence (CCSLC) and interact with teachers who deliver these programmes.
“The purpose for this visit is to gain more in-depth information on several CXCrelated issues, which could benefit education on Saba,” Hemmie van Xanten, Director of the Saba Comprehensive School stated.
Saba currently offers the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), and Van Xanten said the Dutch territory is exploring how it can make appropriate use of the other examinations offered by CXC, such as the CCSLC, CAPE and CVQ. According to Van Xanten, Saba is the only school within the Netherlands, which has been granted permission to teach in English and the CSEC syllabus is used as the content. “The visit of the team from Saba is an opportunity for CXC to deepen its existing relationship with the islands of the Dutch-speaking Caribbean territories,” explained Didacus Jules, Registrar of the Caribbean Examinations Council. “Schools on St. Maarten and two private institutions in Suriname already offer CXC examinations and CXC has plans to embrace countries of the Spanish and French-speaking Caribbean which may have an interest in CXC offerings.” For further information, please contact Cleveland Sam, Public Information Officer at (246) 227 1892 or via e-mail @ CSam@cxc.org
“According to Van Xanten, Saba is the only school within the Netherlands, which has been granted permission to teach in English”.
This is definitely not true. Not only in the Caribbean schools have that permission but even in the European part of the Kingdom at least 38 schools have that permission and do use that. Also on MBO-level those schools can be found.
Well, both Van Xanten and Caderius are right. The exact situation is, that a (public funded) secondary school in the Netherlands is allowed to teach in any language, but all examinations can only be written in Dutch. In this respect the SCS is the only exception in the Netherlands, being allowed to offer the English CXC exams. To be equivalent to the Dutch (Havo) diploma, the CSEC package has to be comparable to the Dutch Havo programme.