A cross-dis­ci­pline team com­pris­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives from sev­er­al Gov­ern­ment min­istries and agen­cies, will be tasked with re­view­ing and re­vis­ing the cur­rent Pol­i­cy on the Re­duc­tion of School Vi­o­lence, ac­cord­ing to an of­fi­cial state­ment from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.

Along with staff of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, the mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary team is ex­pect­ed to in­clude two rep­re­sen­ta­tives each from the Min­istries of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty; Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice; So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices; Sport and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment; Gen­der and Child Af­fairs Min­istry in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter; as well as the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search and In­no­va­tion in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly.

NGOs, Com­mu­ni­ty Groups, re­tired ex­perts and vol­un­teers in the rel­e­vant ar­eas have ex­pressed will­ing­ness to lend sup­port to schools, and it is ex­pect­ed they will be in­cor­po­rat­ed as part of a wide net­work of sup­port as the is­sue of school vi­o­lence is tack­led.

These are the key out­comes of a meet­ing on Mon­day 21st March 2022, con­vened by the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion, Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly. 

“There is the need to ad­dress the prob­lem with im­me­di­a­cy—and this is the con­text in which the team is asked to make its rec­om­men­da­tions for amend­ment of the pol­i­cy,” the ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter stat­ed.

She added: “The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry will in­ter­ro­gate the cri­te­ria used to de­fine high risk schools, com­pile more gran­u­lar da­ta on the type of sup­port re­quired by spe­cif­ic stu­dents whose ac­tions iden­ti­fy them as need­ing in­tense fo­cus, and ad­dress re­source is­sues as far as pos­si­ble.”

Mon­day’s meet­ing was the sec­ond such of a Com­mit­tee made up of a wider cross sec­tion of gov­ern­ment Min­is­ters and agen­cies, to dis­cuss the is­sue of school vi­o­lence.

That meet­ing com­prised the TTPS Com­mu­ni­ty Po­lice Di­vi­sion and sev­er­al Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ters in­clud­ing Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty (MNS), Fitzger­ald Hinds, Min­is­ter of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice (MYDNS), Fos­ter Cum­mings, Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, re­spon­si­ble for Gen­der and Child Af­fairs, Ayan­na Web­ster Roy, along with their tech­ni­cal teams. 

The Com­mit­tee had been charged with re­view­ing a re­port from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion ti­tled, Re­port on Ex­ist­ing Sys­tems to Re­duce In­dis­ci­pline and Vi­o­lence in Schools.

“Schools are con­sid­ered to rep­re­sent mi­cro­cosms of so­ci­ety; thus, the so­ci­etal trend of in­ter­per­son­al vi­o­lence has al­so been not­ed at schools in terms of de­viant be­hav­iour, choic­es made, or in­frac­tions com­mit­ted by stu­dents,” the re­port had stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, 16 sec­ondary schools can be de­scribed as high risk, ex­hibit­ing at least two of the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics: high per­cent­age of Form 1 stu­dents who scored un­der 30% in SEA, high lev­els of in­dis­ci­pline; high ab­sen­teeism, low lev­els of CSEC achieve­ment.  The re­port stat­ed that at least sev­en of these schools ex­hib­it­ed all char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Dur­ing Mon­day's meet­ing, the Com­mit­tee looked at the cur­rent sys­tems and pro­ce­dures in place for re­duc­ing school vi­o­lence, and al­so iden­ti­fied the spe­cif­ic schools with high lev­els of vi­o­lence, and the pro­files of in­di­vid­ual stu­dents who have been sus­pend­ed mul­ti­ple times. 

“Rec­om­men­da­tions were prof­fered for im­prov­ing the ef­fec­tive­ness of mea­sures used to re­duce school vi­o­lence, through the col­lab­o­ra­tive use of re­sources avail­able in var­i­ous gov­ern­ment agen­cies and min­istries,” an of­fi­cial state­ment from the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry said.