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Wednesday, August 13, 2025

$245m spent on textbooks over three years

by

20140513

Gov­ern­ment has spent ap­prox­i­mate­ly $245 mil­lion be­tween 2010 and 2013 to pro­vide text­books for stu­dents at pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary and spe­cial-ed­u­ca­tion schools, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh said yes­ter­day.Re­ply­ing to an Op­po­si­tion ques­tion in the Sen­ate, Gopeesingh said pri­or to the ac­tu­al ex­pen­di­ture, Cab­i­net had ap­proved $247 mil­lion to buy text­books be­tween 2010 and 2013.He al­so said Gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ed a to­tal of 2,249,987 text­books for stu­dents over the 2010 to 2013 pe­ri­od.

Giv­ing fig­ures for the var­i­ous pe­ri­ods, Gopeesingh said the pur­chase of text­books for pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools to­talled $17.8 mil­lion in 2010.In 2011 it rose to $35.6 mil­lion with the in­clu­sion of texts for spe­cial-ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tutes.In 2012, he said an­oth­er in­crease was due to re­quests from prin­ci­pals and teach­ers for un­used books to be re­placed with books that were in keep­ing with school sub­jects. The to­tal cost for text­book pur­chase in 2012 was $84.8 mil­lion and the 2013 to­tal cost was $70.2 mil­lion.

Gopeesingh said so far for 2010, es­ti­mat­ed costs for text­books were $28.2 mil­lion (pri­ma­ry books), $10.3 mil­lion (sec­ondary) and $2.8 mil­lion (spe­cial ed­u­ca­tion).He said the to­tal for the 2010-2013 span in­clud­ed a ten per cent "top-up" es­ti­mate cater­ing for books which were dam­aged, de­stroyed or pil­fered.Gopeesingh said for each sub­ject in pri­ma­ry schools, one text­book is giv­en to each stu­dent. For the eight sub­jects in sec­ondary schools, one text­book is pro­vid­ed to each stu­dent al­so.

For forms four and five, where there were 34 sub­jects, text­books are pro­vid­ed ac­cord­ing to what stu­dents study. At CAPE lev­el, one text­book per sub­ject is al­so pro­vid­ed. Spe­cial-needs stu­dents are al­lo­cat­ed ma­te­ri­als as well as text­books.Gopeesingh said Gov­ern­ment tried to en­sure stu­dents got the books and if for some rea­son they didn't, it was brought to the min­istry's at­ten­tion and reme­died.

He said he wasn't sure Gov­ern­ment was pur­chas­ing for the 76 pri­vate schools, but had giv­en them ma­te­ri­als for ex­am pur­pos­es and was work­ing with 18 pri­vate sec­ondary schools too."We're try­ing to en­sure no stu­dent is left be­hind and will take all mea­sures to en­sure among T&T's quar­ter-mil­lion stu­dents, no one gets an ad­van­tage over oth­ers or no one is dis­ad­van­taged," he said.Gopeesingh said over the 2010 to 2013 pe­ri­od, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 17,600 can­di­dates wrote the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) an­nu­al­ly.

He said an av­er­age of 2.3 per cent of the stu­dents who wrote the SEA were 13 and un­der af­ter March 31 of the par­tic­u­lar year, and whose av­er­age com­pos­ite scores were 30 per cent and less, were al­lowed to re­peat Stan­dard Five and SEA.

Gopeesingh added, "We have no­ticed from 2010 to 2013, we had about 123 pri­ma­ry schools un­der­achiev­ing and we moved, 100 of them have moved to achiev­ing now, and among those that were achiev­ing, 100 are now ex­celling. We've had an im­prove­ment in the lan­guage arts (ten per cent) and cre­ative writ­ing (12 per cent)," he said."We al­so wit­nessed a dra­mat­ic less­en­ing of stu­dents get­ting less than 30 per cent, from 14 to six per cent now, and an in­crease in those get­ting more than 50 per cent."


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