CRC/C/PAN/CO/3-4 (a) There are gaps in school retention for the seventh to ninth grades. Vocational education for the large proportion of children who drop out and are outside the education system is scarce or unavailable; (b) Preschool education coverage is still very limited and the quality of informal pre-schooling in rural and indigenous areas is low; (c) The education cash subsidy has been made conditional upon academic performance, which impacts negatively on poorer children who tend to perform less well than higher income children; (d) The review of school curricula did not include human rights and children’s rights, nor the history and culture of the different ethnic groups in the State party; and, (e) 63. Access to multicultural and bilingual education is persistently lacking. The Committee recommends that the State party: (a) Address the issue of non-completion and children dropping out, and develop second-chance opportunities and vocational education for those children who are left outside the formal educational system, especially but not only indigenous and Afro-Panamanian children; (b) Improve access to preschool and basic compulsory education in rural areas, including those with concentration of indigenous children, refugees and migrants; (c) Modify the criteria for receiving the educational cash subsidy to avoid discrimination and include asylum-seekers and refugees as recipients; (d) Include human rights and child rights as well as the history and culture of the different ethnic groups in the territory in new revisions of the curricula; and, (e) Allocate sufficient human, technical and financial resources for the roll out of the intercultural and bilingual education programme in all indigenous territories as well as in other areas with indigenous populations. H. Special protection measures (arts. 22, 30, 38, 39, 40, 37 (b)-(d) and 32-36 of the Convention) Refugee and asylum-seeking children 64. The Committee is concerned at the lack of an adequate system of identification of refugee and asylum-seeking children in the State party and that as a consequence, children are sometimes repatriated without assessment of their situation. The Committee is also concerned that the refugee determination process is conducted on a “head of household basis”, which in reality prevents children under the age of 18 from being interviewed and to be heard on a process that concerns them. The Committee regrets the lack of appropriate mechanisms for refugee and asylum-seeking children to present individual claims as well as the lack of evidence of application of the best interests of the child in decisions that concern them. 65. The Committee recommends that the State party improve the fairness of the refugee determination system, include the concerned children in the refugee determination process and apply the principle of the best interests of the child. By involving the children, besides the head of the household, this process would allow for children under the age of 18 to be heard and to participate in processes that are of their concern. The Committee draws the State party attention to its general comment 13