Early childhood institutions yet to be fully registered

Two years after the Early Childhood Commission (ECC) made an appeal for early childhood institutions to apply for registration, none has received full registration status.

However, 800 of the 2,277 of the institutions which have been inspected by the ECC have been given a passing grade, after achieving the basic health and safety requirements.

The figures were released at a press briefing at the offices of the Education Ministry on Thursday.

The early childhood institutions which submitted applications to the ECC are yet to receive full registration status because they have failed to attain all the requirements.

Professor Maureen Samms-Vaughn, Chairman of the ECC, says the Commission sets out 12 standards along with several requirements.           

Institutions must have at least one trained teacher on staff, pass public health and safety reqirements and submit police records for all staff members, among other things.

Some institution have not met the standards

In giving a further breakdown of the data, Mrs. Samms-Vaughn said 926 institutions which were inspected have met public health standards.

In addition, 572 have met satisfactory standards for food preparation and delivery.

In the area of fire inspection requirements, two thirds were examined by the fire brigade and only a half achieved satisfactory status.

However, Professor Samms-Vaughn said while the ECC maintains stringent rules, an institution is allowed to operate despite its failure to attain some standards.

"Although I say satisfactory, some of the things can be very minute but are very important, for example, making sure there's an exit sign and making sure that the school does fire drills, so there are things that can be fixed very quickly. The schools are not serious fire hazards by they've been inspected by the fire department which has advised them of what they have to do to bring the schools up to fire safety standards," she said.

Several schools are also still awaiting police and fire inspection as well as teacher qualification records which have to be submitted before permits are issued.

 The release of the data follows a three year period of work by the Commission's Inspectorate team.

MOE wants trained teachers in all early childhood institutions 

In the meantime, Education Minister Andrew Holness says the ministry plans to employ more trained teachers for early childhood institutions.

Of the just over 8,000 early childhood practitioners, more than half have been trained at the Vocational level.

One hundred and thirty-five have diplomas, 590 have attained Bachelors degrees, while 48 have completed their Masters degree.

The Education Minister, who was also at the ECC press briefing, said the aim is to have only trained teachers in early childhood Institutions.

"We accept and acknowledge that we should really ask that all our teachers be trained but where we are now practically is that we can only still maintain the guarantee of providing one trained teacher per school. Relative to the rest of the Caribbean, although Trinidad has more trained teachers that us, we have far more practitioners, so the spread of training in the system is greater," said Mr. Holness.

The Early Childhood Commission says most of the highly-trained teachers can be found at private pre-schools or kindergartens, and at infant schools.