High Court Judge West­min James yes­ter­day grant­ed leave to the Pres­by­ter­ian Church of T&T (PCTT) and the Pres­by­ter­ian Pri­ma­ry Schools Board of Ed­u­ca­tion (PPS­BE) to file for Ju­di­cial Re­view against the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (TSC).

This is for its fail­ure to ap­point teach­ers rec­om­mend­ed by the Board and in­ter­viewed by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, and for chang­ing the re­cruit­ment process for pri­ma­ry school teach­ers in gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed schools.

Jus­tice James al­so grant­ed leave yes­ter­day to the Catholic Ed­u­ca­tion Board of Man­age­ment (CEBM) to join the mat­ter as an in­ter­est­ed par­ty.

The mat­ter was ad­journed to No­vem­ber 27 for case man­age­ment. The PCTT and PPS­BE were rep­re­sent­ed by Dar­ryl Al­la­har, The CEBM by Ian Ben­jamin SC, and the TSC by Mr Rus­sel Mar­tineau SC.

At­tor­ney Kiel Tak­lals­ingh rep­re­sent­ed the Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha as an ob­serv­er.

CEO of the CEBM Sharon Man­groo told Guardian Me­dia that the Board filed last week Mon­day to join the mat­ter.

She ex­plained that the TSC is now con­duct­ing in­ter­views and send­ing the list of can­di­dates to the de­nom­i­na­tion­al boards.

How­ev­er, Man­groo said what ex­ist­ed pri­or was that boards would con­duct their in­ter­views and then send the suc­cess­ful can­di­dates to the TSC for ap­proval

She said this was to pre­serve the char­ac­ter of the school.

“We are very con­cerned that we will not be able to en­sure the preser­va­tion of the char­ac­ter of our schools,” she said.

In Jan­u­ary this year lawyers rep­re­sent­ing the SDMS, which op­er­ates 43 pri­ma­ry schools, five sec­ondary schools, and 12 ear­ly child­hood cen­tres, threat­ened to file the law­suit in a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter sent to TSC chair­man Eliz­a­beth Crouch.

In the cor­re­spon­dence, at­tor­ney Kiel Tak­lals­ingh claimed that the Min­istry and Com­mis­sion act­ed il­le­gal­ly when it in­tro­duced the pol­i­cy that fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fers from the tra­di­tion­al process un­der the Con­cor­dat, which has gov­erned the re­la­tion­ship be­tween de­nom­i­na­tion­al school boards since be­fore In­de­pen­dence.

Fol­low­ing the le­gal threat, the TSC, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, and the de­nom­i­na­tion­al boards met to con­tin­ue dis­cus­sions re­gard­ing sev­er­al is­sues, in­clud­ing the teacher re­cruit­ment process.