Patentia Secondary School students working on their mural.

He made the statement on Friday at an event to mark World Day Against Child Labour being observed on Sunday. It was organised by the education ministry in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation/International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour under the Tackling Child Labour Through Education (TACKLE) Project.

“We will ask the schools to identify children at risk in each region, in each school and we will ask that during the August vacation we have the guidance and counselling officers, school welfare officers … go into the homes and talk to the parents,” Baksh said.

The minister said they will speak to those parents whose children have not been attending school regularly or are not performing well.

He added that they are working on a project to set up an information system that would feed into the school welfare departments and flag students at risk for prompt remedial action.

“We have to get funding for that system; we have asked the TACKLE Project to fund it and they are considering it also.

According to the minister, ensuring children remain enrolled in schools is an important way to avoid the pitfalls of child labour and under new newly drafted education legislation it will be compulsory for children to be enrolled in nursery from three years, nine months and stay in school until age 16. The nursery enrollment age is currently five years, nine months while students must go to school until 15 years.

Baksh bemoaned the pace at which the drafting of the law is proceeding saying that it had been submitted to the Attorney General’s Chambers some 15 months ago. He said staffing constraints have been cited as some of the reasons for the delay.

However, the minister stated that Guyana does not have a significant incidence of the worst form of child labour.

“We have a very low level of cases of the worst form of child labour,” he said, adding that this is borne out by a 2008 study conducted by Educare.

Friday’s event was a “Mural Paint Off” featuring students from the Patentia, St Winifred’s, Plaisance, West Demerara and New Campbellville secondary schools depicting images against child labour.

The International Labour Organisation states that there are some 215 million children worldwide involved in child labour, of which 115 million are in hazardous work (74 million boys and 41 million girls).