The Ministry of Education is moving to make a newly developed digital reporting system mandatory for schools to report issues requiring attention, with complaints to be simultaneously flagged to education officials at the district, regional and national levels.
Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain said the application was developed under the instructions of Education Minister Sonia Parag and is intended to allow school-related problems to be reported and addressed more quickly.
“I am very, very happy this afternoon to share with you an app that has been developed by the Ministry of Education under the instructions of the Honourable Minister of Education Sonia Parag which will attempt to collect all the issues around schools and resolve them very, very quickly,” Hussain said.
The system will be available to every school in Guyana and can be accessed by head teachers, teachers in charge and principals using their schools’ official email addresses.
Hussain demonstrated the process, showing that users must first select “Start a Report” and verify their identity using a code sent to the school’s official email address.
Once logged in, the user selects the education region and the relevant school from a list of institutions.
The user is then required to describe the issue, identify the category of the complaint and indicate its level of urgency.
Using a broken pipe as an example, Hussain classified the matter as a water and sanitation issue and selected “immediate safety concern” as its level of importance.
Users can also upload photographs to support their reports before reviewing and submitting the complaint.
According to Hussain, once a report is submitted, it is sent to the respective District Education Officer, Regional Education Officer, Regional Executive Officer and the Ministry of Education.
“This issue has been submitted,” Hussain said during the demonstration, before explaining that multiple levels of the education system are notified once a complaint is lodged.
He said four officers at the Ministry of Education have been assigned to monitor the complaints and will follow up daily with the regions to determine whether reported issues have been resolved.
Hussain said the Ministry will shortly issue a circular making use of the system a legal requirement.
“Headmasters, head teachers, teachers in charge, principal, you must use this system to report a complaint, to report an issue at your school,” he said.
“I repeat, you must use this system.”
Hussain stressed that the system is intended to ensure that problems at schools are formally brought to the attention of the authorities so they can be addressed.
“We cannot, we cannot, I repeat, we cannot fix issues which we do not know about. We have to be told and so we should be able to fix those issues once we are told,” he said.
Hussain said the new application will therefore serve as the required channel for schools to report issues to the Ministry and the relevant education authorities.
The new app comes in the wake of a flurry of complaints about problems at schools following the start of the new academic year.
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