Nauru Secondary School enrolment to increase in 2021

Nauru Secondary School (NSS) could see an influx of students this academic year 2021.

The Education Department’s Director of CASE Unit, Rosario Taumea said this is due to countries where the Government sends its scholarship students closing and tightening their borders because of the on-going Covid-19 pandemic.

Nauru Media News – NTV reports the Education Department met parents of the 2020 scholarship recipients and explained that they will not be travelling abroad to continue their education until borders are open.

There are 20 Year-8 scholarship recipients and 6 Year-9 students.

The students including those that returned from Fiji in December 2020 will all be based at Nauru Secondary School this year.

The Education Department is diligently working on having everything in place and ready to cater for these students before the academic year starts.

This involves fixing up additional classrooms to cater for the influx of students and recruiting 80 local and 7 expatriate teachers from Fiji who fortunately were processed in 2019 but did not come in 2020 and will do so this year.

Enrolment at Nauru Secondary School is usually between 500 to 600 students, however with travelling stood down due to borders closing, enrolment at NSS in 2021 could possibly reach 800 with scholarship and private students schooling abroad remaining and based at Nauru Secondary School.

NSS students in Years 11 and 12 will do the Queensland curriculum with students choosing which subjects they want to do including extra courses through TVET.

Years 9 and 10 students will do the national curriculum of core national subjects.

Part of the reason in recruiting local teachers is because NSS is commencing a new programme  in remediation class for students lingering at the 25 to 39 percent.

The intention is to bring these students up to the borderline mark of 40 to 49 percent.

NSS has already commenced the remediation programme  for border line students last year in 2020 and found it to be successful with statistics revealing 11 out of 17 students achieved 50 and up to 70 percent while 2 were absent and 4 went down to 25 to 39 percent.

The department’s teacher’s orientation week commenced yesterday (Monday).

The academic year will begin on Monday,  25 January 2021.

 

Photo supplied Nauru Media News - NTV  Caption: Nauru Secondary School