Renaissance Reading Programme |16 July 2021

Minister Valentin (standing, photo right) addressing delegates during yesterday’s webinar

Seychellois children accessed 66,000 books

The Renaissance learning team in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the Ministry of Education yesterday afternoon organised a virtual meeting to discuss and showcase the achievements of the Renaissance Reading Programme across schools being implemented here since last year.

The Renaissance webinar yesterday was themed ‘the Seychelles reading journey’ and it took place at the Ministry of Education where the team at the ministry gave a progress report on the accomplishments so far.

Since the beginning of the Renaissance Reading Programme, the Seychelles team was spearheaded by Cyril Pillay and Margaret Allen from the UK team. They have accumulated a lot of statistics that reflect the ongoing success of the programme here.

From the last visit of the UK-based coordination team, a number of fun activities have been organised and the team initiated several competitions to keep the students interactive.

Statistics show that 50,000 books were accessed in 2020 and 16,000 in 2021 bringing the total number to 66,000. Even during lockdown, children had access to the programme and they recorded 443 hours of reading at home during this year’s lockdown.

In August 2020, there was the August Break Competition and in just two weeks, pupils spent 350 hours reading 2,200 books. Takamaka primary and Praslin secondary took first places.

Another activity was the Saturday Reading classes for Au Cap pupils hosted by the school.

One of the activities to celebrate the 250 years anniversary of the arrival of the first settlers in Seychelles, Renaissance launched a second reading competition that ran until the end of the school year. During this competition, pupils read over 15,000 books and over 300 certificates have been awarded. Pupils of Au Cap primary averaged over 100 hours per week and received 115 certificates.

It has been noted that pupil engagement is high during out-of-school hours, with 59% of reading taking place before 8am, after 4pm and during the weekends. In 2020, pupils spent over 2,583 hours reading in the evenings and 1,113 hours reading over the weekends.

Renaissance Star Assessments are also being used to assess the progress of pupil literacy. A total of 4,256 assessments were administered in 2020. This will allow Renaissance to monitor progress using pupil’s first Star test as a baseline. Currently, P2, P3 and P6 pupils are using Star Assessments while myON is available to all year groups across the 25 primary schools.

The webinar yesterday was followed by the Minister for Education Dr Justin Valentin; the principal secretary for early childhood, primary and secondary education, Dr Odile de Comarmond; the Renaissance team leader for Seychelles Cyril Pillay and other officials of the ministry.

In his opening address Minister Valentin stressed on the distinct features of the ministry’s new strategic direction on the need to deploy information communication technology (ICT) in our education system more effectively with a view of creating possibilities for learners and teachers to engage in new ways of information acquisition and analysis and for all schools to take all the opportunities offered by the learning platform.

“The Renaissance Reading programme aptly contributes to the realisation of the strategic objectives and is the leading provider of literacy solutions in over 90 countries,” said Dr Valentin.

The three-year programme launched in 2019 has since seen significant improvement in the areas of reading practices for all students with a strong focus on building their ability in reading comprehension.

PS De Commarmond stated, for her part, that the good practice undertaken by the high achieving schools can be served as example and adopted by other schools to benefit all children.

Mr Pillay concluded the virtual discussion by noting that teachers should help pupils to log in for the first time and auto-save their login names and passwords; conduct short sessions with the pupils on how to access the platform and how to go about reading on myOn.

“In order to be successful we need the involvement of and cooperation with parents who should encourage their child/children to access myOn at home and at school other activities should be organised around myOn.”