Gov­ern­ment will recog­nise the top 200 high-per­form­ing stu­dents and the top 25 pri­ma­ry schools from the 2025 Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) Ex­am.

The an­nounce­ment was made by Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Michael Dowlath dur­ing a post-Cab­i­net me­dia con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre yes­ter­day. The top stu­dents will re­ceive cer­tifi­cates of ex­cel­lence and com­mem­o­ra­tive to­kens, while the top schools will be award­ed plaques.

“This ini­tia­tive will high­light the achieve­ments of schools and stu­dents, fos­ter­ing a cul­ture of ex­cel­lence and en­cour­ag­ing im­prove­ment across the ed­u­ca­tion­al sys­tem. It will hope­ful­ly mo­ti­vate them to per­form even bet­ter,” Dowlath said.

This year, 17,870 stu­dents took the SEA ex­am. Due to a tie, 201 stu­dents were recog­nised in the top group, in­clud­ing 123 fe­males (61.2 per cent) and 78 males (38.8 per cent). Vic­to­ria was the high­est-per­form­ing dis­trict with 30 per cent of the top stu­dents, fol­lowed by St George East (25 per cent) and Ca­roni (21 per cent). To­ba­go and the North­east­ern dis­trict ac­count­ed for one per cent and three per cent re­spec­tive­ly.

Da­ta from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion re­vealed that 68.2 per cent of top-per­form­ing stu­dents at­tend­ed de­nom­i­na­tion­al schools, 20.4 per cent at­tend­ed pri­vate schools, and 11.4 per cent were from gov­ern­ment schools. The top 25 schools were con­cen­trat­ed in St George East and Port-of-Spain (sev­en each), Vic­to­ria (five), Ca­roni (four), and St Patrick (two), in­clud­ing Hin­du, Pres­by­ter­ian, and Mus­lim schools.

A three-way tie for first place in­clud­ed Nicholas Dol­ly from Ch­agua­nas Gov­ern­ment, Boodram Ma­haraj from Macaulay Gov­ern­ment, and pri­vate can­di­date Xavier Teles­ford. Kailash Di­als­ingh of Ex­change Pres­by­ter­ian and Ash­lyn Ramkissoon of Jor­dan Hill Pres­by­ter­ian ranked fourth and fifth, re­spec­tive­ly.

Dowlath al­so re­vealed that the gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ing mod­i­fy­ing the SEA ex­am by im­ple­ment­ing a con­tin­u­ous as­sess­ment com­po­nent, re­duc­ing re­liance on a sin­gle end-of-year ex­am.

In ad­di­tion, the min­istry plans to up­grade wire­less ac­cess across schools. Band­width will be ex­pand­ed at 125 gov­ern­ment and gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed sec­ondary schools, while 454 pri­ma­ry schools will re­ceive new net­work ac­cess points. The ini­tia­tive aims to im­prove teacher train­ing, mod­ernise the cur­ricu­lum, and sup­port e-learn­ing.

“We will es­tab­lish a na­tion­al min­i­mum in­ter­net band­width stan­dard for sec­ondary schools at 500 megabits per sec­ond down­load and 250 megabits per sec­ond up­load. This will al­low the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to mon­i­tor and man­age wire­less ac­cess across all schools and en­hance elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” Dowlath said.

The up­grades align with the broad­er ini­tia­tive to pro­vide lap­tops to all in­com­ing Form 1 stu­dents for the 2025–2026 aca­d­e­m­ic year.

Dowlath al­so re­port­ed a 91 per cent stu­dent at­ten­dance rate on the first day of the new school term and con­firmed that re­pairs for over 271 schools, in­clud­ing 170 re­quir­ing emer­gency work, have been com­plet­ed.