The Ministry of Education should not have been surprised by parents’ reaction to its questionnaire seeking data for the National Student Registration Programme.

After all, information relating to the income of parents and guardians and the living conditions of children does not relate to the ministry’s functions, neither does it fall within the remit of the State body responsible for the administration of education islandwide.

Outside of the experience of Mr Nicholas Mullings, the grade six teacher at Dunrobin Primary School in St Andrew who told this newspaper last week that almost all the parents of the 53 students in his class did not fill out the section about their incomes, we are aware that many parents felt offended by the questionnaire. The education ministry, they told us, had no need for the information.

Against that background, Education Minister Andrew Holness analysed the issue perfectly when he acknowledged at a news conference to address the controversy that the State’s effort to get information is always greeted with suspicion.

We would have thought that the technocrats at the education ministry would have been sensitive to that fact and would have sought to familiarise parents with the questionnaire before sending it out to the schools which urged parents to complete it in order to meet what appeared to have been a tight deadline.

The blunder aside, we agree with Minister Holness’s argument that in order for the State to better serve its citizens it will need more information about those very citizens.

That is especially true in today’s environment where resources are too inadequate to properly address people’s pressing needs.

In the brouhaha that accompanied parents’ anger at the intrusive elements of the questionnaire, many people, we suspect, missed the fact that the National Student Registration programme is designed to have students registered at their first point of entry into the school system.

The upshot is that the process will eventually replace the need for registration for the sitting of the Grade Four Literacy and Numeracy Tests and the Grade Six Achievement Test.

This, according to the education ministry, “will significantly reduce the registration challenges experienced every year in the education system, speed up the registration process and allow more time for data verification and ultimately greater accuracy”.

The ministry has also said that it is currently developing what it terms an Education Management Information System (EMIS) which will be supported by and supplied with information from the National Student Registration.

“The EMIS will create an account for each student and collect and accumulate his/her records in one central database. To facilitate this, each student will be assigned a Unique Identification Number that will track the student throughout the primary and secondary levels of the system in the first instance,” the ministry said.

The strategy, we believe, makes sense, especially when we take into consideration the ministry’s intention to create a central student records database that will allow for planning, monitoring, evaluating, assessing, tracking, accounting, research and quality control.

We are encouraged by the intention. Let’s hope it will be implemented and put to good use.