PETER CHRISTOPHER
peter.christopher@guardian.co.tt
Students who have written the Secondary Entrance Examination (SEA) will know their placings next week Friday.
Minister of Education Anthony Garcia announced that the results will be released on June 28th, during a press conference at Education Towers this morning.
The Minister also announced that results will continue to be published in newspapers, but parents will have to option to have their children's name removed.
"Within recent times there were some issues that were brought forward in the public domain. Issues that have been identified by both parents and the stakeholders. Issues with respect to transparency and the right to publish or not to publish that might infringe on privacy issues and also established practices. As a Ministry of Education we could not close our eyes to various concerns," said Minister Garcia.
The minister said the decision came following consultation with stakeholders and a legal opinion.
"We are going to publish the 2019 results of the SEA examination that has been written by our students. However, if any parent feels that his child results should not be published then that parent has the option of informing the Ministry of Education in writing of that desire to not have those results published," said Garcia.
Chief Education Officer Harrilal Seecharan said this option had previously been offered to parents of children in sensitive situations such as protective custody but from this year onward all parents will have the option.
"The decision really is to continue that process. We've always with-held students names where we've had requests from parents based on a number of reasons, matters before the family court to students under protective custody etcetera," Seecharan said,
"For 2019 we are continuing with that practice where those parents who have written to us asking for their student, their child information to be withheld those will be honoured. The remainder of the students will be made available to media houses and those will be published."
He said, however, from 2020, this option will be incorporated into the registration process.
"What we proposed to do going beyond 2019 however is as part of the registration process, to make available the option for all parents so that they can indicate from the point of registration if they would like their child name to be withheld or not and therefore it becomes part of our regular placement process and from the IT side it will be easier to pull those names out."