Monitoring For Quality Academic Achievement In State Schools In Mauritius

Opinions about quality in education are by no means unified. Quality in education is receiving increasing attention from all stakeholders of the education system and is becoming an utmost matter of concern. When thinking about the quality of education, it is useful to distinguish between educational outcomes and the processes leading to them taking into consideration the inputs. One of the ways to seek the defined outcomes is to look at the academic achievement at school level and the effectiveness of school heads in monitoring students’ performances towards quality academic achievement. This study have analysed performances of43state schools at the secondary level for the Cambridge School Certificate ’O’ level examinations for the years2007to2011through a longitudinal survey design. The findings show that the performances of the selected schools have not improved statistically over the observed period as depicted by the statistically significant p values, implying that stakeholders have not been able to improve the quality of academic achievement directly putting into cause the management effectiveness of Rectors in analysing academic achievement. Furthermore in the observed cohort, performances of girls’ schools are better than those of boys’ schools on the overall and also in the four zones in which the schools are from. This tendency of girls out passing boys, have been observed in some fields in recent regional and international studies. To gear the secondary educational environment towards quality academic achievement, recommendations have been made for Rectors, zone directorates and at the ministry levels.