BSSEE Town Hall Meeting Takeaways - Allocation Criteria (Mailing Address, Zone, Choices, Scores, Spaces Available)
Having looked at the Choice of School Form (C.O.S.F.) in our last post, we now want to take a look at the criteria that needs to be met in order for a child to be allocated to a secondary school. There are five main factors that determine if a child is allocated to a secondary school and which school they will be allocated to; mailing address, zone, school choices, scores and number of spaces available.
This address must be the one on file for the child at the school at which he/she is currently attending and will determine the schools that can be selected on the C.O.S.F.
As was previously explained, the Barbados school system is separated into 3 geographical zones. The address that is used when filling out the C.O.S.F. form will determine the zone in which a child is located. There is a criteria that the first 30% of students allocated to any school must come from within the zone in which that school is located. This means that when selecting an out of zone school as your choice, your child will be competing with the entire island for the remaining 70% of spaces available.
Parents need to pay special attention to the order in which schools are selected. Although the 1st and 2nd choices are open choices, the 1st choice also indicates the school you would most like your child to attend, while the 9th choice represents your least preferred school. Your child will be assigned to the highest placed choice for which they meet the criteria.
Each school has a range of scores of the students who are allocated there each year and based on these scores, there is usually a cut off mark for the students who are allocated to that school. In order for a child to be allocated to a school selected on the C.O.S.F., they will have to fall within the range of scores for students allocated to that school. Each school has an in-zone range and an out of zone range which may be different. The range of scores is determined by the number of students who wish to attend that school and the marks they achieve in the exam.
Each school advises the Ministry of the number of students they can accept each year.
Students are allocated to secondary schools via a computer program. The allocation process begins with the students who have selected each school as their first choice. The students are allocated to the spaces available in the school in order of their examination scores. This process is performed for all the schools.
The program then moves on to students who have selected each school as their second choice. If there is space available at that school after the first pass of the allocation, then students are allocated to the available spaces in order of their examination scores. The process is then repeated for third choice selections down to the 9th choice selections for students who have not been allocated to a school.
This process means that based on space availability, the lower down you put your desired schools, the less chance there will be of your child actually getting allocated to that school. Two students with the same marks could select the same school, but one has the school as their first choice and the other has the school as their second choice. The student with the school as their first choice gets allocated to the school, but the student who listed the school as a second choice does not get in because the allocation was exhausted from the first pass and the computer does not get to the students who listed the school as a second choice.
Additionally, since 30% of students must be allocated from within the school’s zone, it is possible for students to be allocated to a school within their zone with a lower score than students from outside the zone.
At the end of the allocation process, there are some students who may not be allocated because all the spaces at their school choices have been filled. These students will be manually allocated to a school by the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation.
The views expressed here are solely those of Aries Technologies Inc. and are aimed to provide assistance to parents with children preparing to sit the Barbados Secondary School Entrance Examinations. Each article is our own interpretation of information gathered from various sources and is in no way meant to be the official word of any school, government agency or third party entity.