WHAT’S GOING ON?

What is the SEA?

The Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA), formerly recognized as the Common Entrance Exam, is a 2001 examination issued by Trinidad and Tobago’s government annually for primary school children aged eleven and twelve. A required exam for all fifth graders as a component of the secondary schools’ admissions process, it tests students in three subjects: Mathematics, Language Arts, and Creative Writing. Students’ likelihood of attending their top choice secondary school depends on how high their examination score is. Consequently, high-performing students commonly attend high-performing schools, while students who perform lower tend to enroll in lower-performing schools. To better understand the exam in an American context, the SEA is similar to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the admissions process, except the SEA exam is assigned to fifth-grade students rather than junior-senior high school students.

The Recent Timeline:

  • July 2019: Barbados became the first Caribbean country to abolish the SEA to “create more diverse and equitable educational opportunities for schoolchildren,” (Mendes-Franco, 2019).
  • January 2020: Trinidad’s Education Minister Anthony Garcia announced that the exam would remain in Trinidad and Tobago, stating: “We are not simply going to follow Barbados. We have our own things to deal with, and we are doing everything to ensure that there is equity in the system,” (Hunte, 2020).
  • March 2020: COVID-19 emerged and schools began to shut down. Consequently, most students no longer had access to SEA preparation or resources provided by the school (Sanatan, 2020).
  • June 2020: Trinidad’s Ministry of Education announced that they will still hold SEA exams in August. The decision sparked uproar from parents and the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers Association (TTUTA). They believed the August date did not give students ample time nor resources to prepare. The TTUTA suggested October so students had the opportunity to reunite with teachers and prepare, but the Ministry did not budge.
  • Presently: Parents, politicians, and community members continue to speak out against the SEA. As for the Ministry, no words thus far…