Latest update May 25th, 2026 12:35 AM
It’s a question of fairness
The Ministry of Education has sounded a stern warning to its Education Officers. It will not be tolerating transfers to schools higher than what any child has qualified for.
It is well known that just after the results of the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) are published, there are parents who try to beat the system. If their child did not do as well as they expected they would try to see if they could obtain a transfer to a school that has a higher cut-off mark. For example the parents of a student passing for St. Roses High school would try to see if they can gain admission into Bishop’s High School or Queens College.
Or the parents of a child who qualified for a junior secondary school would seek to obtain a transfer to another secondary school with a higher cut- off mark.
The Ministry has made it clear that it will not allow transfers for those seeking placement at schools with a higher cut off mark. This is fair. But the brush of fairness needs to be applied evenly to other areas as well. As the start of the new school year approaches, some parents try desperately to get their students into certain primary schools even though they do not live anywhere near to the catchment.
Amongst the schools where traditionally there was a rush was Starter’s Nursery and St. Margaret’s Primary. This is no longer so because since the catchment areas for those schools was extended to cover Tiger Bay, many parents decided that they no longer wished to have their children go to that school. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know!
But parents do try to gain places at certain select primary schools. And some of them do gain these places even though they do not live in the catchment of the school.
The Ministry has a system whereby if all the places in a particular school are not filled and there are other students from outside of the catchment who are interested in filling those places, these vacant places would be filled by randomly selecting persons. So if after the students from the catchment have been placed it is found that there are five more places for a particular school but there is also a waiting list of one hundred students from outside the catchment interested in attending that same school, those five places would be filled through a random selection.
The problem arises when there are other students from the catchment area who are denied a place because of the randomly-placed students. As such, it is important that the Ministry ensures that no student from the catchment is denied a place because of a randomly placed student. The Ministry should only allow for random placements after it would have ensured that no student from the schools catchment would have been denied entry.
But while the Ministry has indicated that it would take a serious view of unlawful transfers by education officers, it has said nothing to the headteachers. There have been rumours going around for years that there are headteachers that allow students back door entry into their schools.
In other words, the Ministry can tighten up how much they want. This may not prevent a headteacher from admitting a student to his or her school unknown to the education officials.
In fact, the rumour mill abounds with stories about such practices. It has long been suggested that there should be reconciliation between the registers of schools and the records of the Ministry to ensure that headteachers do not allow backdoor admissions. Guyana is a small country and there are people with money who are capable of bribing headteachers to secure backdoor admissions for their children into certain schools. These backdoor admissions, if they exist, would be unfair.
Equally unfair are situations whereby a student writes the NGSA and gains marks for a junior secondary school. There years later that child finds himself or herself at the country’s top senior secondary school. There is apparently some system that allows students from junior secondary school to write an examination and based on the marks obtained to gain a transfer to a senior secondary school.
Unless this is a system that is advertised and open to all students of junior secondary schools, it should not be tolerated.
Recently there was a well publicized case of a student who years ago gained a place at a junior secondary school but who was able to transfer in third form to a senior secondary school. Unless all students in the system are given a chance to write an examination to be so transferred, this system should be discouraged.
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