By A Correspondent- The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has introduced a programme to profile learners to enable their grooming and the nurturing of their skills progressively.
Under the programme, “Learning Support Services Client Profile Database”, profiles will be created for every learner.
A school in Bulawayo sent a letter to parents and guardians inviting them to participate in the exercise. The letter, which was seen by the Chronicle, reads in part:
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MOPSE) is rolling out a programme to screen and profile learners in schools.
In this regard, the Learning Support Services is developing a system to enable schools to create profiles for individual learners.
A set of screening and profiling tools has therefore been introduced for use in schools. You are invited to the school for the data collection on your child.
It is an assessment of developmental domains of functioning in young children.
It is for individual child and parent benefit through child-centered approaches, referrals and monitoring.
… Let us avoid sending just anyone from the family e.g. driver, house helper, or a distant relative as this may lead to the collection of inaccurate data.
The collected information of individual learners will be fed to the Education Management Information System database and will be updated throughout their infant, junior and Secondary education years hence the need to supply accurate data.
Primary and Secondary Education Ministry communications and advocacy director Taungana Ndoro said:
This is going to assist in the management of the child so that when a certain talent is identified in the learner, we develop that talent from an early age.
We want to groom and nurture the skills that they have from the primary and secondary levels.
There is a lot of information that we need from the parents and guardians and we will even need information like the number of siblings and a lot of other things.
So, it’s a huge tool. We will collect data until the data of the last pupil in our school has been collected.
Ndoro urged parents and guardians to cooperate with education officials during the exercise.