Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Fazal Karim says for years some sec­ondary stu­dents and se­nior com­pre­hen­sive stu­dents who were seen as "fail­ures and mis­fits" in the world of acad­e­mia now have a new ray of hope with the es­tab­lish­ment of the pro­grammes. He lament­ed that these stu­dents had to re­sort to in­for­mal ap­pren­tice­ships un­der a mas­ter crafts­man or a men­tor. The stu­dents, Karim said, could ac­cess Gate and be­come cer­ti­fied, a process which he felt could help lift their self es­teem.

"This sys­tem is go­ing to bring eq­ui­ty and al­so gen­der bal­ance through in­creased op­por­tu­ni­ties and ac­cess to high­er lev­els of par­tic­i­pa­tion and ar­tic­u­la­tion with­in the qual­i­fi­ca­tions frame­work," Karim said.

Karim re­called that tech­nol­o­gists and tech­ni­cal ex­perts in T&T came through trade schools, many of which were at­tached to com­pa­nies in their own spe­cif­ic sec­tors such Ca­roni 1975 Ltd, T&TEC and Tex­a­co.

"For coun­tries to in­crease their rate of de­vel­op­ment, ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing can­not be skewed on­ly to acad­e­mia, but must have a bal­ance with the de­vel­op­ment of psy­cho mo­tor skills, which has a re­la­tion­ship with the cog­ni­tive and the af­fec­tive do­mains of ed­u­ca­tion." Karim said the pro­grammes will have with­in them, mod­ules for en­tre­pre­neur­ship and in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy which will en­hance the stu­dents' over­all com­pe­ten­cies, mak­ing them more mar­ketable for wage em­ploy­ment, but more im­por­tant­ly al­low them to be­come self em­ployed.

The re­view of the Gate pro­gramme has iden­ti­fied gaps in fund­ing for the TVET pro­grammes. Cur­rent­ly there are 32 pri­vate sec­tor train­ing providers that are reg­is­tered un­der the Na­tion­al Train­ing Agency (NTA), which pro­vide train­ing in TVET ar­eas at Lev­el 11. How­ev­er, their trainees are un­able to ac­cess fi­nan­cial sup­port from the Gov­ern­ment.­