Fedoma wants special needs exams officer
Federation for the Disabled in Malawi (Fedoma) has asked Malawi National Examination Board (Maneb) to employ a full time examination officer who would focus on issues to do with students with disabilities sitting for national examinations.
Executive Director for Fedoma, Action Amos, said the exam officer would be specifically looking at the students needs before, during and after exams in order to improve in areas that are critical to their progress in education.
“When the board is queried on the provision of a special needs examination officer, they always say there is one in place but in actual sense, the officer is busy with other things and has never benefitted our students,” said Amos.
The need for the full time special needs examination officer surfaces after several attempts by Fedoma to acquire this year’s Malawi Schools Certificate of Education (MSCE) statistics from Maneb proved futile.
“I have been personally engaging Maneb to provide my office with this year’s MSCE results for persons with disabilities but my efforts are not bearing fruits,” said the Fedoma boss.
He said Maneb’s inability to give them access to the figures on how physically challenged students performed is hindering their programming work.
“We would want to gauge the students’ performance and analyse the challenges that they face during the examination,” he said.
Maneb public relations officer, Simeon Maganga, advised Fedoma to contact respective candidate and /or school on how they performed.
“Please be advised that candidate and/or school performance is private and confidential as doing so is tantamount to breaching the client confidentiality agreement,” argued Maganga.
He said for this reason, Malawi News is required to contact respective candidates and/or schools as they have exclusive rights to make public their results.
Amos said in the 2013/2014 academic year, 612 special needs students sat for MSCE where most of them especially the hearing impairments had problems due to format and timing of the exam.
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