THE EDITOR: Permit me some space to publicly respond to the Education Minister's reply to a letter I sent her.

Dear minister,

I have received your reply and thought it appropriate to make my response public. You said any parent wishing to know their child’s SEA ranking can file a FOI request.

Parents are mostly satisfied when their child has got the school of his/her choice. The point made in my letter to you, but which was not addressed, was the callous way our top SEA achievers have been dismissed by you.

SEA is the culmination of a child’s primary school life.

It is the benchmark of the success of the teachers and school. It’s the end result of years of work put in by children, parents and their teachers. This is the main focus of the school’s achievement, not how many other awards, trophies and competitions were won.

Stakeholders in the SEA are not only children and their parents. Thousands await the results and, for decades, looked forward to the publication of the top 100. Many letters have been written about the scrapping of this practice yet all have been ignored.

Madam minister, when your tenure ends, would you look back and feel pleased that your ministry heartlessly abandoned a practice that was the cause of much joy and exhilaration to thousands every annually?

Much is being bandied about concerning those who fall through the system. This certainly needs to be addressed.

But why completely ignore those who stuck it out, laboured through all the difficulties and were rewarded with good or even excellent results?

Soon SEA 2023 results will be out. It is not too late to put right this grave injustice.

Schools need to know how their children placed, teachers need to know if their hard work paid off, parents and children need to know that their sacrifices were not in vain. And friends, families and well-wishers need to know in order to send their congratulations.

How can you determine a school’s performance if you don’t know how many of their students got into the top 100? Why must individuals go through an FOI in order to know how their child performed?

Minister, imagine how you would feel knowing that you have corrected a wrong by reinstating this custom of publishing the results. Imagine how many thousands of people would be so happy.

If you do decide to publish, perhaps consider doing so for the last three years as well.

MEHRUN RAHAMAN

Via e-mail

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