Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education and Youth, Dr Kasan Troupe, says a review is being done of the procedures in place to prevent an ’embarrassing’ recurrence of stolen Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) papers in Jamaica.

This comes after fireproof cabinets containing nine subjects scheduled to be administered were stolen from a high school in Jamaica in June of this year.

The incident follows the CXC Math Paper 2 leak a few weeks earlier.

Among the measures to be taken by the ministry are the installation of CCTV cameras in locations where examination papers are stored, and the retraining of principals to ensure that they observe all the protocols for examination administration.

“We really want to ensure that our systems work. The OEC [Overseas Examination Commission] is going through an audit now of all the safety cabinets that we have in our schools, they are specially built for this and with special codes and so forth, so we are going to ensure that all of those systems are working. The last deliberations we had with OEC is to add to their budget the security feature of CCTV cameras, either to attach that to the cabinet itself or to install that in the location of the cabinet, so we can have instant footage of what’s happening around the papers,” Troupe said at a post-Cabinet press briefing on Wednesday, November 22.

She stressed that the OEC will be more vigilant in the selection process of examination managers for each school.

“We are going to re-look, we have re-looked and we are going to be vigilant this year, we cannot as a country afford another experience of this nature, it was very embarrassing for us and it is also a cost factor for the CXC [Caribbean Examination Council] to provide an alternative paper for our students. The Government had to foot that bill because we could not have asked parents to pay that cost again, we had to assume that cost, which is an increase in our budget, so we had to ask CXC to move speedily ahead while we put the process in place to compensate them for this activity. It’s a significant cost, a significant embarrassment to the country,” she stressed.