Parents and Administrators Urged to Register Students

Minister of Education, Hon. Andrew Holness is imploring parents and school administrators to ensure that students at the primary level are registered under the national student’s registry.

“We appeal to parents and to schools to ensure that the registration forms which are being circulated in the schools for the grade five students this year, are completed,” he said. 

The Minister was addressing a press conference held at his offices in Kingston on June 21, to announce the results of the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT).

Mr. Holness said the Ministry has had some difficulties with schools and parents not turning in the registration forms on a timely basis, which has resulted in some delays in the processing of examinations, “because we simply did not have the accurate and complete information on all students.”

The Minister said the registration of students will enable the Ministry to better assess the students’ performance, and explained that under the national registry, students are centrally registered and documented at the Ministry of Education.

“Each student is assigned a unique identification number. This number allows us to track the progress of students, and it allows us to record their results and their behaviour as well,” he informed.

 He noted that the Ministry has four national assessment exercises that it conducts at the primary level under its National Assessment Programme (NAP), which involves the Grade One Individual Learning Profile, the Grade Three Diagnostic Test, the Grade Four Literacy and Numeracy Test and GSAT.

The Minister contended that when the student is registered, it would be unnecessary for the student to keep registering for each test.

“We encourage parents, that if your child is registered under the national system, they will not need to register over and over again for all the national exams. They will be in the database,  so all we would do is pull up that child’s record and if there needs to be any updating, then we will merely update the record, but we would have the critical information from Grade One,” he said.

The GSAT forms part of NAP, which is aimed at determining how students are learning at key stages throughout the primary level and their readiness to access secondary level education.

It is a curriculum-based examination, dealing with materials covered in the Grade Four to Six curriculum. The examination is used to place students at the secondary level by ranking their overall performance in all subject areas.

CONTACT: ALECIA SMITH