Eight Schools Now On Govt’s Financial Management Information System

Eight schools are now on the Government’s Financial Management Information System (GFMIS), Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Youth, Skills and Information, Dr. Kasan Troupe, has advised.  

She said the GFMIS will allow for ease of accounting and transparency, pointing out that it will enable the Ministry to better report publicly on how government resources are being spent in the education sector.  

Fifty schools were selected for the pilot project, and Internet connectivity is in place for all institutions.  

In her remarks during the Education Transformation Oversight Committee’s (ETOC) press conference at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Regional Headquarters in St. Andrew on Friday (January 17), Dr. Troupe said 194 school personnel and 14 regional financial and information and communications technology (ICT) staff have been trained to use GFMIS.  

“The aim of this really is to remove the demands on our principals to do accounting work. Right now, the principals, especially of our primary schools – 766 of them – have to account for the financial resources. We have to remove that from them, so they can function as instructional leaders in the true sense of that word,” she explained. 

Dr. Troupe also shared that the Ministry rolled out an Education Management Information System (EMIS), with a soft launch on December 18, 2024.  

Some 935 schools, comprising 17,905 teachers and 492,278 students, have been onboarded on the EMIS platform.  

The EMIS will, among other things, record student data, performance and attendance.  

To date, 15 schools are recording students’ attendance digitally, while another 10 are 95 per cent ready to begin using the platform.  

Dr. Troupe shared that Portfolio Minister, Senator Dr. the Hon. Dana Morris Dixon, has tasked the team with developing a guideline to manage absenteeism in schools.  

“We’re going to be able to manage behaviour better. We’re going to see the infractions live, we’re going to know what’s happening… so we can respond better. Most importantly, we’re going to be able to track performance in a standardised way in our system to see what is happening, and the assessment policy is being developed to guide the standardised entering of data in our platform,” the Permanent Secretary said of the EMIS’s other benefits.  

ETOC has been charged with monitoring the implementation of 365 recommendations contained in the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission (JETC) report, which was chaired by Professor Orlando Patterson.