BBC News at Wolmer’s Boys, 2002: teachers lost to England, and a British pupil in Kingston
March 15, 2002
LONDON / KINGSTON — In two BBC education reports that week, Mike Baker named Wolmer’s Boys’ School.
On 15 March 2002, “UK ‘poaching’ Jamaican teachers” recorded that Wolmer’s had lost two languages teachers and a biology specialist to schools in England. Principal Dave Myrie said specialist teachers were hard to replace “even at a prestigious grammar school like Wolmer,” called the recruitment “very unfortunate” and “doing serious damage to our education system,” and described the drive as “more like rape and pillage.” Jamaica’s education minister, Senator Burchell Whiteman, told the BBC the system was “at risk.”
Four days earlier, “British pupils sent to Jamaican school” followed Donna Murray and her British-born son Nkosi, then 13, who had left primary school in Neasden for Wolmer’s Boys — “one of Jamaica’s most prestigious secondary schools,” set “behind impressive gates, and set around a cricket oval.” Nkosi said the teachers were “much stricter.” Baker wrote that most boys at the school went on to three or four A-levels. Myrie, “born in Britain of Jamaican parents,” said Jamaican schools thrived on “high expectation and firm but fair discipline” and that “the bottom line is that students are expected to do well.”
Source: BBC News, March 15, 2002. Republished for the Wolmer’s Trust community with attribution.
Also: BBC News, 11 March 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/1867513.stm
