In reg­is­ter­ing his angst, Sub­ran lament­ed the con­tract had not been award­ed to Mt Saint Vin­cent Uni­ver­si­ty, Cana­da, but to an­oth­er Cana­di­an-based group, EDUNO­VA–with spe­cial em­pha­sis on nu­mer­a­cy, lit­er­a­cy and IT.An ex­cerpt from Sub­ran's let­ter said, "The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion has now con­tra­dict­ed best prac­tices in cur­ricu­lum de­vel­op­ment and has ig­nored the be­liefs of the pop­u­la­tion for a bet­ter so­ci­ety to give for­eign­ers the lead­er­ship role in this very im­por­tant na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment project."

Sub­ran felt lo­cal tal­ent and the views of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion were ig­nored in the ex­er­cise. He added, "There are many grad­u­ates in cur­ricu­lum de­vel­op­ment here who can lead this project, but sad­ly their tal­ents are on­ly recog­nised abroad. The of­fi­cial re­sponse may very like­ly be lo­cal teach­ers have been en­gaged in sup­port­ive roles. How­ev­er, the lead­er­ship of this project is where de­ter­mi­na­tions are made about the kind of so­ci­ety T&T can be­come. We might as well shut down our three lo­cal uni­ver­si­ties."

In his re­sponse to EDUNO­VA's in­put, Seecha­ran not­ed sup­port was be­ing pro­vid­ed by the Cana­di­an con­sul­tan­cy team EDUNO­VA. It is a con­sor­tium com­pris­ing the tech­ni­cal ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­per­tise of 13 Cana­di­an uni­ver­si­ties. He made ref­er­ence to the fact EDUNO­VA had em­ployed 18 in­ter­na­tion­al and lo­cal ex­perts for this project, in­clud­ing per­son­nel from UWI and UTT–two of the uni­ver­si­ties Sub­ran is claim­ing should have been shut down. Seecha­ran ex­plained that the ten­der­ing process was above board.

"The EDUNO­VA Con­sor­tium was se­lect­ed from an open in­ter­na­tion­al ten­der process un­der the am­bit of the Cen­tral Ten­ders' Board. EDUNO­VA is pro­vid­ing sup­port to the MOE writ­ing team in­clude bench­mark­ing, field test­ing of the new cur­ricu­lum and in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tices. In that process, which took place in 2010, no lo­cal groups pre­sent­ed them­selves as con­tenders, even though the lo­cal uni­ver­si­ties were in­vit­ed to do so," said Seecha­ran.

"EDUNO­VA has been in­volved in train­ing the lo­cal cur­ricu­lum writ­ing team in the above named ar­eas and will be pro­vid­ing analy­ses of oth­er crit­i­cal sup­port ar­eas to­geth­er with rec­om­men­da­tions for in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tices and bench­mark­ing to en­sure that our cur­ricu­lum is of the high­est in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard."He not­ed the pro­gramme of co-op­er­a­tion was on­go­ing.

"Dif­fer­ent mem­bers of their team have been vis­it­ing Trinidad for ap­prox­i­mate­ly three days at a time to pro­vide train­ing and share best prac­tices. The bulk of the train­ing took place in De­cem­ber and Jan­u­ary. EDUNO­VA will con­tin­ue to vis­it and pro­vide guid­ance and sup­port as the project pro­gress­es."

UWI has been in­volved in ex­pert as­sess­ment of the cur­rent cur­ricu­lum and draft­ing pro­pos­als for crit­i­cal as­pects of the new cur­ricu­lum in the ar­eas of lan­guage ed­u­ca­tion, ad­dress­ing the gen­der gap in per­for­mance and ad­dress­ing Con­tin­u­ous As­sess­ment. Three UTT lec­tur­ers are in­clud­ed on the EDUNO­VA team.