Rishard Khan and

An­na-Lisa Paul

Some 19,198 pupils are ex­pect­ed to sit the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) to­day and Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly is ask­ing them to put their best foot for­ward.

“Do your best, stu­dents; that’s all we ex­pect of you,” Gads­by-Dol­ly told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

“I of­fer to teach­ers, par­ents and stu­dents God’s bless­ings for a suc­cess­ful ex­am­i­na­tion and the re­minder that SEA, im­por­tant as is it, is not the end of their jour­ney, but the start of their next stage.”

Gads­by-Dol­ly said all arrange­ments have been put in place for the ex­am.

Some 9,904 boys and 9,294 girls are reg­is­tered to write to­day’s ex­am, which will last for three hours and 20 min­utes. To­ba­go has 986 can­di­dates.

The pupils will be test­ed on sub­jects in­clud­ing Math­e­mat­ics, Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts and Eng­lish Lan­guage Arts Writ­ing.

The ex­am will be­gin at 8.30 am at 552 ex­am cen­tres across the coun­try and con­ces­sions have been grant­ed to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 440 pupils this year.

As anx­i­ety, ap­pre­hen­sion and trep­i­da­tion con­tin­ue to build ahead of the ex­am, the Na­tion­al Par­ent Teacher As­so­ci­a­tion (NPTA) is urg­ing par­ents to make an ex­tra ef­fort to keep their kids calm.

NPTA pres­i­dent Zena Ra­matali said, “Be­sides par­ents be­ing over-anx­ious and stressed, we need to keep our chil­dren calm. We need to build that con­fi­dence in them.”

Thank­ing teach­ers and par­ents for get­ting the SEA pupils to this point—es­pe­cial­ly as they nav­i­gat­ed on­line learn­ing—Ra­matali ad­mit­ted, “Chil­dren have missed out tremen­dous­ly. We un­der­stand the learn­ing loss. How­ev­er, we wish our chil­dren all the best in terms of their fu­ture en­deav­ours.”

She added, “We need to let our chil­dren know this is not the end of the jour­ney...this is on­ly the be­gin­ning. So, let’s give our chil­dren our love and the bless­ings that they will per­form to the best of their abil­i­ties on that day and we will take it from there to en­sure that as they get to sec­ondary school, they would leave with a full cer­tifi­cate and be em­ploy­able so they will be an ide­al cit­i­zen we want for T&T.”

Ra­matali urged par­ents to en­sure their chil­dren know that they can suc­ceed no mat­ter what school they go to.

Pres­i­dent of the Con­cerned Par­ents Move­ment of T&T (CPMTT) Clarence Men­doza al­so ex­tend­ed best wish­es and good luck to the SEA pupils.

“We take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to thank all teach­ers and par­ents for work­ing with all stu­dents dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to en­sure that they are well pre­pared. This group of stu­dents would have en­dured the bulk of on­line learn­ing and will prove to us their abil­i­ty to ex­cel un­der such cir­cum­stances,” Men­doza said.

Dur­ing a me­dia brief­ing on Mon­day, the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Kurt Mey­er, con­firmed that 61 schools had been iden­ti­fied for emer­gency re­pairs ahead of to­day’s SEA ex­am.

“These jobs are wash­rooms, lights, ven­ti­la­tion is­sues,” he said.

He said while all jobs were to be com­plet­ed by to­day, crews will be on stand­by in the event any ad­verse sit­u­a­tion aris­es.

The Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny (MTS), which is re­spon­si­ble for ef­fect­ing school re­pairs, al­so as­sured, “Re­pairs on the ma­jor­i­ty of schools have been com­plet­ed.”

A to­tal of 3,400 teach­ers and prin­ci­pals have been trained as in­vig­i­la­tors and met Tues­day at their as­signed ex­am cen­tres to en­gage in a mock re­hearsal ahead of to­day.

While there were some con­cerns pre­vi­ous­ly ex­pressed about the num­ber of in­vig­i­la­tors, T&T Uni­fied Teacher’s As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) first vice pres­i­dent Mar­lon Seales as­sured there will be suf­fi­cient su­per­vi­sion.

“Teach­ers will nor­mal­ly go way be­yond so if a teacher is called to­mor­row (to­day)...to stand in the gap for his or her class, I have no dif­fi­cul­ty that per­sons who would have not orig­i­nal­ly vol­un­teered will come out in emer­gency cir­cum­stances,” he said.