The EEH is a four-year project supported by the Ministry of Education and United States Agency for International Develop-ment (USAID). Thirty thousand students, from 71 primary schools and 2,000 out-of-school youths, from six non-governmental organisations, benefit from the project, which comes to an end next year.

More school enrolled

Twenty-three other schools, which are part of the project met their literacy and numeracy targets and graduated from the programme Thursday.

"We can celebrate the work we have done to improve the performance of boys," Sean Osner, deputy director in the Office of Sustainable Development at the USAID, told the gathering at the graduation ceremony, held at the Hilton Kingston hotel.

Osner said several schools have reported improvements in the attendance of boys and have cited instances where boys performed better than girls in some standar-dised examinations.

"However, we are aware that the EEH needs to accelerate its efforts to integrate gender and roll out proven practices to a large number of schools and we look forward to pursuing that in the coming months," he said.

Osner lauded the graduating schools for their efforts.

"These schools have risen to the challenge and achieved the criteria of improved performances in literacy and numeracy by implementing effective classroom and leadership practices," said Osner.

Sixty-two of the 71 project schools have now satisfied the criteria for graduation, based on improvements in numeracy and literacy.

Meeting the criteria

He urged the remaining schools that are yet to meet the criteria not to be discouraged.

The 23 new graduating schools have met specific criteria including acceptable performance in literacy at the grade four level, maintained over two years with 65 per cent of students at mastery level.

Acceptable performance was also achieved in mathematics at the grade three level, maintained over two years with 65 per per cent at the mastery level.

Success of the programme

In her remarks, Dr Jean Beaumont, director of EEH, said the successes of the programmes were wide and varied. She cited one school that had a pass rate of 11 per cent and managed to improve student performance to 77 per cent.

She said the national numeracy test, which is now part of the Ministry of Education's activities, was developed under the EEH. Additionally, software which was designed for administrators to store data on teachers and students has been adopted by the Ministry of Education.

Project sees improved attendance, performance among male students