The Ministry of Education and Technical and Vocational Training launched its attendance hotline in January. The phone line is dedicated to reporting school aged children who are not in attending school.
Acting Director of Education, Dominique McCartney-Russell gave an update on the initiative in an interview with ZNS News. She outlined some of the issued that are keeping students away from school. ”Two of the parents talked about registration, issues with immunization, not having an NIB card and in some instances it was just neglect, parental neglect that the children were not in school. And so what the officers have been trained to do is to provide support or to escalate the matter if it needs be.”
There is a team fourteen school monitor officers working the hotline. McCartney-Russell said, “they’re trained to asked the right questions and they’re also trained in term of escalating the matter because some matters are as a result of the need for social assistance. And so we want our officers to be able to say this is where you can get help. And so the officers are trained to escalate the matter. We don’t want at the end of the day a student is presented and there are barriers. We train our officers so that if there are barriers you go through those barriers to make sure that this child’s need is being met.”
The Acting Director also spoke to the obligations of the Department of Education under the law. ”The act also indicates there should be 200 attendances. And so we as a body who have been mandated to ensure children get quality education opportunities see it as our obligation to ensure that that takes place. And so we also know that if students do not attend school, they don’t gain an education it means that they are ignorant and if they are ignorant they are not able to number one, obtain gainful employment, they’re not able to take care of themselves and they are not able to contribute to the national development.”
The hotline has received approximately 90 reports.
