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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Ministry to standardised registration forms for primary schools

by

Rhondor Dowlat
2350 days ago
20190130
Government

Government

Rhon­dor Dowlat

In a bid to avoid dis­crim­i­na­tion of par­ents and their chil­dren with re­gards to who gets ad­mit­ted in­to which of the pri­ma­ry schools in T&T, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion has stan­dard­ised its reg­is­tra­tion forms.

This was one of two main con­cerns ad­dressed by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence held at the min­istry’s head­quar­ters at St Vin­cent Street, in Port-of-Spain.

Gar­cia as­sured that the forms, which will be sent soon to all dis­trict of­fices and emailed to all schools, will out­line the process that must be fol­lowed in terms of ad­mis­sion of stu­dents.

He, how­ev­er, not­ed that the form is not an ad­mis­sion form but a reg­is­tra­tion form.

He said, “From this, the prin­ci­pal will be able to cap­ture the da­ta that is nec­es­sary to as­sist in ad­mit­ting stu­dents. We found in the past some schools de­cid­ed to de­vel­op their own forms and in some of these forms, there were cer­tain re­quire­ments of par­ents which in our view lent them­selves to dis­crim­i­na­tion.”

“Be­cause things like the in­come of a par­ent, the in­come of per­son who rec­om­mend­ed the child, the job that some these per­sons held…some of these things were put on the forms and that was a form of dis­crim­i­na­tion and we found that we need­ed to stan­dard­ise the form so that there will be no ac­cu­sa­tion of dis­crim­i­na­tion,” he added.

Gar­cia said chil­dren, on reach­ing the age of five years, would be al­lowed to be reg­is­tered and not younger. He al­so not­ed that the child will be placed in schools with­in a 3 km range of their re­spec­tive homes.

In the sec­ond is­sue, Gar­cia an­nounced the in­tro­duc­tion of a staff job let­ter ap­pli­ca­tion sys­tem on­line, which he said, will save time, es­pe­cial­ly to teach­ers.

The sys­tem, which was de­vel­oped by the min­istry’s ICT Di­vi­sion, con­sists of se­cure, on­line forms and au­to­mat­ed ap­proval flows that al­lows all clas­si­fi­ca­tions of the min­istry’s staff to re­quest job and em­bassy let­ters via the min­istry’s web­site and in­tranet.

He said pos­i­tive dis­cus­sions are, how­ev­er, still on­go­ing with Em­bassies’ of­fi­cials.


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