Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Michael Dowlath says chief among his pri­or­i­ties in of­fice would be to in­tro­duce a more “child-cen­tred” learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in the pub­lic school sys­tem while mak­ing full use of tech­no­log­i­cal tools to en­hance train­ing.

Dr Dowlath worked for 15 years as prin­ci­pal of Na­pari­ma Col­lege be­fore his re­tire­ment in 2021. Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia af­ter be­ing sworn in at a cer­e­mo­ny at the Pres­i­dent’s House yes­ter­day, Dowlath said he was con­fi­dent that his decades of ex­pe­ri­ence as a teacher and school ad­min­is­tra­tor would be in­valu­able to his cur­rent role.

Re­fer­ring to the man­date giv­en by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to all min­is­ters to take a “boots on the ground” ap­proach to their jobs, Dowlath said he was ea­ger to meet with all mem­bers of the min­istry to look at what cur­rent sys­tems and pro­grammes are in place.

Asked what some of his main con­cerns were, he said strength­en­ing the ed­u­ca­tion ex­pe­ri­ence at all lev­els would be one of his first goals. “What we want to look at is how we’re go­ing to be more ef­fi­cient and ef­fec­tive in the use of tools like AI and al­so in terms of look­ing at pro­grammes for the re­train­ing of teach­ers and train­ing of par­ents to en­sure we all have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing, keep­ing the child at the cen­tre of it, so it’s re­al­ly go­ing to be a move to­wards child-cen­tred ed­u­ca­tion and en­sur­ing that all the sys­tems work ef­fec­tive­ly.

“What we have seen over the years in the sta­tis­tics is that many of these stu­dents have dropped out or have been left be­hind by the sys­tem, so we want to en­sure that what­ev­er sys­tems we have in place, we make them more ef­fi­cient but we add those tools to en­sure all of our stu­dents at the end of their course of stud­ies.”

One of the ini­tia­tives in­tro­duced by the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion from 2010 to 2015 was the dis­tri­b­u­tion of lap­tops to Form One stu­dents.

Dowlath said this would re­sume, not­ing that tech­nol­o­gy would play a more cen­tral role in prepar­ing stu­dents for the next phase of learn­ing.