Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion came un­der heavy scruti­ny for not be­ing able to pro­vide suf­fi­cient da­ta on spe­cial needs staff at Ear­ly Child­hood Care and Ed­u­ca­tion (EC­CE) Cen­tres. This hap­pened at yes­ter­day’s 17th meet­ing of the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) on So­cial Ser­vices and Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion, this time fo­cus­ing on ear­ly child­hood.

Chair­man of the Com­mit­tee, In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Paul Richards re­called sev­er­al com­plaints the mem­bers re­ceived dur­ing their site vis­its to sev­er­al EC­CEs. Both par­ents and teach­ers were frus­trat­ed due to the lack of re­sources for their spe­cial needs chil­dren.

The min­istry’s Man­ag­er of the Stu­dent Sup­port Ser­vices Di­vi­sion, Ayin­ka Nurse-Car­ring­ton, con­firmed that there are 31 EC­CE stu­dents di­ag­nosed with spe­cial needs, while there are 93 stu­dents not di­ag­nosed, but sus­pect­ed of hav­ing spe­cial needs. How­ev­er, the brunt of crit­i­cism came from the com­mit­tee when min­istry rep­re­sen­ta­tives were un­able to pro­vide fig­ures on how many spe­cial needs cer­ti­fied teach­ers were em­ployed by the min­istry to as­sist these 124 stu­dents.

Nurse-Car­ring­ton said she would have to send the com­mit­tee a writ­ten re­sponse since she did not have the ex­act num­ber on hand.

Richards re­spond­ed, “I find it dif­fi­cult to ac­cept that the min­istry has come be­fore the JSC to an­swer ques­tions on Ear­ly Child­hood Cen­tres, when one of the main is­sues is stu­dents with dis­abil­i­ties, with spe­cial needs, with­out in­for­ma­tion. That’s as­tound­ing to me, quite frankly, that it needs to be pro­vid­ed in writ­ing.”

He added that not pro­vid­ing da­ta while the JSC is broad­cast­ing would not be help­ful for the pop­u­la­tion of T&T.

“It is frus­trat­ing be­cause part of the re­mit of the com­mit­tee is to find out what’s work­ing, what’s not work­ing and pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions for so­lu­tions. While pol­i­cy doc­u­ments and pro­ce­dur­al doc­u­ments are fine, with­out da­ta we can’t make an as­sess­ment as to what’s work­ing. Part of the rea­son for the JSC al­so is to pro­vide the pub­lic with a live overview of ac­count­abil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy as to what’s work­ing in their in­ter­est,” Richards said.

Richards al­so re­vealed that dur­ing their site vis­its, they found sev­er­al cen­tres ne­glect­ed by the min­istry.

“We vis­it­ed eight Child­hood Care Cen­tres, two gov­ern­ment, and six ei­ther pri­vate or gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed pri­vate, and most of them have not been vis­it­ed by min­istry of­fi­cials for years. In some in­stances, over ten years. If that’s a small sam­ple of what’s hap­pen­ing out there, the con­cern is how are you go­ing to know what’s hap­pen­ing with those un­reg­is­tered pri­vate cen­tres that may be in ar­eas that may not have come to your at­ten­tion.

“Even those that we vis­it­ed were all reg­is­tered and had not been vis­it­ed by min­istry of­fi­cials to check com­pli­ance, health and safe­ty, ad­her­ence to cur­ricu­lum, teacher train­ing, et cetera,” he said.

Mean­while, rep­re­sen­ta­tives for To­ba­go’s Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search and Tech­nol­o­gy lament­ed that they are un­der­fund­ed and need more re­sources.

“In the long term, we ac­tu­al­ly have se­ri­ous re­sources that we need in To­ba­go. Very of­ten we ask for a sig­nif­i­cant amount of re­sources be­cause we know the needs. We know the HR needs, the mon­i­tor­ing, and eval­u­a­tion need­ed, we know the le­gal needs, et cetera. But we do not get the type of al­lo­ca­tion we look for­ward to in or­der to en­hance our ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor,” said the di­vi­sion’s Tech­ni­cal Ad­vi­sor, Ann Natasha Sec­ond.

“In the long term, we ac­tu­al­ly need three EC­CEs phys­i­cal­ly, so we need fund­ing be­cause the size of the pop­u­la­tion is bur­geon­ing, es­pe­cial­ly in the West. We need spe­cial needs teach­ers ... we’re look­ing at oc­cu­pa­tion­al ther­a­pists, we’re look­ing at speech ther­a­pists.”

She said these re­quests were al­ready filed in their bud­get pro­pos­als. She al­so called for greater com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and said they need to work to­geth­er.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Min­istry of Health and the Na­tion­al Main­te­nance, Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny were al­so ques­tioned by the com­mit­tee con­cern­ing the safe­ty of EC­CE cen­tres.