Although faced with a potential challenge that could have hampered the learning process of nursery-age children, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand has reported that there were no major complaints.
The Ministry had introduced a revised entry age for nursery children which kicked into motion at the start of the school year in September last. Previously a child had to be three years old by March 31 in order to enter Nursery School in September of the same year. However, with the revised undertaking by the Ministry, children were eligible to enter the nursery level in September even if they would have turned three in June.
Minister Manickchand at her most recent press conference at the Kingston Georgetown, National Centre for Education Resource Development (NCERD), informed that her Ministry has been closely monitoring the revised tactic.
According to the Minister, ahead of introducing the revised age of entry, the Ministry had started holding national consultations in 2013. She however, noted that “I didn’t think that we were prepared in the system to accommodate these children in September 2013, for many reasons…” At the time, Manickchand said that the Ministry was not able to ascertain how many children would have been eligible for acceptance.
She however noted that based on figures from the General Registrar Office, it was evident that there were about 1,000 new births every month.
“We could have estimated that it would be about 3,000 more children added with the three months period that we were allowing for…The problem with that, is that, we didn’t know how the children would be spread out,” said the Minister.
Added to this, she said that “we didn’t know whether we would have most of them in Georgetown; all of them in Georgetown; none in a particular Region; if a particular school would have 500 new children while no other school had any; we had to really plan for it and get our parents to register (their children).”
And so registration for nursery children started in January as opposed to previous years, when it started around April/May to allow the Ministry to make preparations to accommodate the additional children. The Minister continued that “frankly we haven’t had any major complaints. I haven’t heard of any, but nursery-age children are always, when they get into schools, first they will bawl the school down for maybe the first week, and they bawl a little bit less for the first month and by the end of the first term they settle in.”
Another known issue that children face, the Minister said, is that of limited independence, whereby some of them are unable to use the toilets or are unable to eat by themselves.
“We could have had a major problem on our hands if this was really going to hamper the learning environment for all the children in the classroom,” noted the Minister. But according to her, the Ministry was able to minimise a series of potential problems by inviting about 90 per cent of the entrants’ parents to meetings, ahead of the start of the school year (July/August holiday), that sought to solicit their (parents) support to prepare their children for school.
“We asked them to teach their children and be of help in the home, but that flew under the radar…the press wasn’t interested in that,” said the Minister as she pointed out that “we had parents who knew what would be expected of their children and what they could help with over the holidays.”
The end result, the Minister said, is that the nursery system was able to receive children who were more prepared in September than ever before.
“All of our children are never going to be able to use the toilet and so on before they go to school, you will always have that percentage that the teachers will have to work with,” said Manickchand as she reiterated that “most of our children are prepared and ready for learning.”
Source: https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2015/01/07/education-ministry-monitoring-revised-nursery-entry-programme/