NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS (April 25, 2013) —Premier of Nevis and Minister of Education in the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) Hon. Vance Amory told Education Officials and Principals at a training workshop tailored for them by the Department of Education on Nevis, that they were engaged in a task that would subsequently enhance the education system.

Mr. Amory made the comment when he delivered remarks at the start of a two-day workshop on Teacher Appraisal Training for Education Officials and Principals which concluded at the Red Cross Conference room on April 24, 2013.

“What you are engaged in is a wonderful task preparing yourselves, being prepared under the guidance of your facilitator, the guidance of your Permanent Secretary and the assistant facilitators, to enable the education system in Nevis to become something which is dynamic, something which is reliable for the development of our human resource and for our society,” he said.

The Education Minister stated that he was pleased for that type of training since it was an important factor to gauge the status of performance.

“I am very happy that this training is taking place so that we can have assessments because without assessments we may go off a page and we don’t know. So today I want to ask the question, why does an institution want to establish a system of appraisal? You will be answering that question during the course of the day and there may be many answers.

“I want to suggest that the importance of creating an appraisal instrument, now the instrument is not the appraisal but having the instrument, will guide the process in terms of the things or the matters which will be looked for, which will be identified and which therefore will be graded, rated or simply evaluated in a broad manner,” he said.
Mr. Amory also said that appraisals had great importance because of the need for periodic checks regarding the status of an institution, in that case by the Education Department and by extension the schools, to determine whether or not the path along which the output was being made was in fact in keeping with the objectives achieved at the end of the period of evaluation.

“In Education, appraisal is paramount; it has to be paramount … It has to be a priority and it must therefore be critical to establish those goals and objectives which will be appraised periodically or at the end of a specific term or year,” he said.

The two-day training workshop was facilitated by Education Consultant Dr. Bronte Gonsalves.