Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion’s Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer Har­ri­lal Seecha­ran says a de­ci­sion on whether the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment re­sults will be pub­lished is still to be de­ter­mined.

“We will bring to bear on the ta­ble all the views and the le­gal ad­vice from our le­gal de­part­ment be­fore our de­ci­sion is made,” Seecha­ran in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day morn­ing, hours be­fore the top­ic was dis­cussed at a strate­gic ex­ec­u­tive meet­ing at Ed­u­ca­tion Tow­er, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

“I am not at this point at lib­er­ty to say that will be a fi­nal de­ci­sion but cer­tain­ly, it is up for dis­cus­sion.”

Seecha­ran ad­mit­ted, how­ev­er, that oth­er stake­hold­ers who were not sched­uled part of yes­ter­day’s meet­ing will still need to be con­sult­ed about the de­ci­sion.

“We have to al­so take on board the views of the dif­fer­ent stake­hold­ers NPTA, teach­ers’ union, par­ents, so that all of those will be tak­en on board, I guess, dur­ing the dis­cus­sion. This meet­ing this evening will pri­mar­i­ly be with the strate­gic ex­ec­u­tive team in the min­istry, if need be I sus­pect that we may fur­ther en­gage oth­ers,” he said.

The is­sue has be­come a press­ing one for the min­istry in re­cent weeks, as many have crit­i­cised the pub­li­ca­tion of re­sults due to its im­pact on the pri­va­cy and psy­che of stu­dents.

Ad­dress­ing this, Seecha­ran said, “There are sev­er­al things that would have come up in re­cent times. One is as you would be aware a lot of our ex­perts are talk­ing about ad­di­tion­al stress on stu­dents. From our le­gal side, there are is­sues re­lat­ing to the pri­va­cy of stu­dents and their re­sults and a num­ber of peo­ple have ad­vo­cat­ed that their re­sults not be pub­lished,” said Seecha­ran.

Al­so con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Na­tion­al Par­ent Teacher As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Raf­fiena Ali-Boodoos­ingh said her group should be in­volved in dis­cus­sions on the mat­ter. She ex­plained that she had felt the prac­tice di­rect­ly con­tra­dict­ed the ini­tial process of re­sult dis­tri­b­u­tion.

“It is so pri­vate­ly done, giv­ing out the re­sults in schools. Prin­ci­pals have to give it in in­di­vid­ual en­velopes, to par­ents, not to chil­dren, to the par­ent,” said Boodoos­ingh.

“And sur­pris­ing­ly, a few days lat­er you will see it on the pa­pers? On one side you want pri­va­cy and on oth­er side it is pub­lic knowl­edge?

“I still hold my view that (it) should be pri­vate to the par­ent and the child.”

At­tempts to get Seecha­ran fol­low­ing yes­ter­day’s meet­ing were un­suc­cess­ful. How­ev­er, min­istry of­fi­cials said it was un­like­ly any de­ci­sion would have been made on the mat­ter.

SEA re­sults are usu­al­ly re­leased in the last week of the school term, which this year falls in the first week of Ju­ly. —Pe­ter Christo­pher