National Student Registration Programme to be Implemented this School Year

Education Minister, Hon. Andrew Holness, has said that the Ministry will be implementing its new National Student Registration Programme during the upcoming academic year.
The new system will seek to capture information on all students in the school system and placed on a single national database.
“Technology is such that we now have the capacity to capture, manage, analyse and utilise data for the entire population. Normally we work from samples, so we have to draw inferences from anecdotal information, but the Ministry is now moving to capture information on every single child in the school system,” he explained.
Mr. Holness was speaking to journalists at a press conference held at the Ministry in Kingston on September 1, to address back-to-school matters.
He said implementation of the new system would give the Ministry an effective planning tool that would provide significant benefits for students, adding that the new system would operate in a distinctive way, where every child that is registered in a school would be given a unique identification number.
“That number will become their account number in education and every bit of information and transaction that happens in education with that child, will be recorded, reported and deposited in that information account,” he outlined.
Mr. Holness further informed that for the first time, the Ministry would be able to nationally record the Grade One Individual Learning Profile of the child, which would show the student’s state of readiness. “So, we will know the children who started out being ready, almost ready and not ready, and we will be able to track the development of the child,” he said.
The Minister said the new system would also be able to give educators a chance to detect whether behaviour has had an impact on the child’s performance, as well as capture information on the child’s household.
Mr. Holness pointed out that the system would make the process of registration for examinations much easier on both parents and teachers, as once the student is already in the national database, there would be no need for any further entry registration for examinations.