At least 50 students from the inner-city will benefit from professional tutoring classes for CSEC math and English, thanks to a new partnership with GetAced Academic Services, and the Grace Kennedy and Digicel Foundations.

Dubbed the GetAced Academic Access Project the initiative is geared toward increasing numeracy and literacy at the high school level.

GetAced is a tutoring company that offers premium online tutoring for students sitting PEP, CSEC and CAPE exams.

“Every student who is sitting CSEC has to do math and has to do English, but even beyond that, last year we would have seen the daunting results. We have seen the pass marks reducing time and time again. This year we want to make an active difference and so we conceptualised this project and we reached out to the relevant persons,” explained Velonique Bowen, executive director of GetAced Academic Services, during the official launch of the project on Saturday in Downtown Kingston.

The classes will feature two topics per day with one two-hour bloc reserved for each topic. That’s a total of four hours with a break in between and a test at the end of each session, which Bowen is hoping to use to track the students’ progress.

Project Officer at Grace and Staff Community Development Foundation, Daniel Jarrett praised the project, which he said aligns with those already being undertaken by the foundation.

March 17, 2025
“Grace and staff has been targeting students from many different communities, we have a lot of community centres and we are happy to now have GetAced to bring the expert tutoring to us,” said Jarrett.

He said GraceKennedy was concerned about the floundering grades in the two subjects as he highlighted the need for additional support, especially in mathematics.