THE Ministry of Education has implemented two new programmes in schools which it hopes will help with the assessment of its policies, the management of data, monitoring of students, and eventually a reduction in disruptive behaviour by delinquent children.

According to Education Minister Andrew Holness, the Jamaica School Administrative Software (JSAS) and the National Students Registration Programme (NSRP) are two of the ministry's latest initiatives, as they move towards "data-driven decision-making".

He said the programmes will work together as information collected on each student through the NSRP will be registered on the JSAS.

"The National Student Registry is the framework on which JSAS operates as the registry creates a unique identifier for each student globally. So each student now has an account number in education, and for every interaction with their education system, the information will be collected and deposited in the account," Holness explained in an interview with the Observer.

He said the programmes would not only register the students' biographical and demographic information, but also their learning profile. This will eventually be made accessible to parents who want to gauge their child's performance in school.

"As we perfect the system we will give parents access to it, so a parent can just log on and see what the child is doing virtually," Holness said. "It will not be immediate, though we will get there; but for the first two or three years, they will probably have maybe a 10-day delay, because data has to be uploaded and verified as it comes to the ministry."

While the JSAS programme is up and running in some schools, the NSRP is still being piloted in about 30 schools. Holness said the pilot phase will give the ministry about six months to work out all the kinks, after which it will be rolled out nationally.

The two programmes will work in conjunction with the recently launched Career and Advancement Programme (CAP), which is geared towards training and certifying the approximately 38,000 unattached Jamaican youths who leave secondary school each year. The programme focuses on knowledge, skills, national service and apprenticeship, which means that students being trained in data entry will be used to enter the data into the JSAS and paid a stipend.

The minister assured that schools wishing to have the programmes installed could call the education ministry, which will appoint students to do so. However, for the programmes to work successfully, educators will have some added work to do.

"It is the students who are being trained in the Career Advancement Programme who will be doing the back-end work, (but) teachers will be having some back-end work to do," said Holness. "When they mark their grades, they will have to enter it on the system, but the data entry core volunteers will also be available to schools."

A computer lab has already been established at the ministry's Caenwood Centre in Kingston to allow volunteers to enter the data on JSAS; but the minister said much has not been said about the programmes because they are still being finetuned.

"The national registration is going on now, people are filling out their forms. But come the end of September when all the registration is finished and the grade one inventory learning profile is done or the individual learning profile is done, then the career advancement students will come in," he said.

He pointed out that the programmes are very important as they will allow educators to better identify those students involved in gang activity, those who have mental issues and those who have health issues before they exit the school system.

"It is a profile, and that is how you start to manage crime, but if you know you are going to graduate these guys, they have no skills, they don't have anything, then you need to be putting your resources there, before they find other things to do," he said.