The Government Assistance to Tertiary Education (Gate) programme will expand to include technical and vocational areas, says Minister of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education Fazal Karim. He made the announcement at Thursday's post-Cabinet news conference at the Office of the Prime Minister in St Clair. He said Cabinet's decision to expand the programme was an election promise by the People's Partnership.The minister said the People's Partnership had indicated its intention to expand the programme to include Technical, Vocational Education and Training (TVET).
He said: "What we are doing is honouring our manifesto promise and it is now the policy of the Government in terms of the expansion of Gate from primarily academia to the vocational area to ensure we equip our workforce with the requisite skills to respond to the labour market to increase their competitiveness."He said the Gate programme for the fiscal year 2010 to 2011 had a budgetary allocation of $625 million and catered for approximately 27,300 students so far this year.
Karim said the official start of TVET would be in April this year, and the estimated annual expenditure of Gate for this programme was an allocation of $16 million.He said there were criteria for funding of the programme."The criteria for funding programmes will be based on the Accreditation Council of Trinidad and Tobago and the National Training Agency will be the authority for registration and approval," he said.He also said an assessment of the tertiary education sector would be undertaken.
"We will be looking at policy and priority areas of the Government of T&T," he said."One of the things that will drive this initiative is that we will be facilitating the expansion of Gate into TVET in programmes that are labour market driven and that would be done through research through the National Training Agency." -With reporting by Raphael Lall