In the sec­tion on ed­u­ca­tion in the Bud­get State­ment for Fis­cal 2024, the most pop­u­lar men­tion has been the $1,000 School Sup­plies and Book Grant. Com­men­ta­tors seized on it be­cause it is a re­lief for poor peo­ple. Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert pro­posed it against the back­ground of “ever-chang­ing book­lists” and the ris­ing costs of school ma­te­ri­als (uni­forms, bags, shoes, sta­tionery, etc). The re­lief was go­ing to cost $65 mil­lion and would ben­e­fit 65,000 “needy stu­dents”.

Im­bert men­tioned oth­er pro­pos­als and achieve­ments, such as the Re­me­di­al Ed­u­ca­tion Pro­gramme and the Va­ca­tion Re­me­di­al Pro­gramme; ex­pand­ed Wi-Fi ac­cess for stu­dents in schools; “marked im­prove­ment in grades” by SEA, SEC, and CAPE stu­dents; stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of text­books; the num­ber of break­fasts, lunch­es, and re­fresh­ments pro­vid­ed; con­tin­ued pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment of teach­ers; and greater fo­cus on Tech­ni­cal and Vo­ca­tion­al Ed­u­ca­tion and Train­ing (TVET), es­pe­cial­ly the short­age of TVET teach­ers. But these have not at­tract­ed as much dis­cus­sion.

Why not? Why have we heard pre­cious lit­tle dis­cus­sion on these mat­ters, some of which are un­ques­tion­ably of greater im­port to the de­vel­op­ment of our na­tion? Im­bert pro­vides some da­ta on stu­dent per­for­mance, along with a pos­i­tive judge­ment, in the fol­low­ing para­graph, which should give us pause even though the sta­tis­tics are sparse:

We have made sig­nif­i­cant progress in stu­dent achieve­ment with marked im­prove­ment in grades among pupils who wrote the 2023 Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (SEC) and Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tion (CAPE) as well as the 2023 Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment Ex­am­i­na­tion (SEA). In­deed, in 2023, 67.8 per cent of writ­ten en­tries in CAPE had pass­ing marks com­pared with 62.7 per cent in 2022. SEA can­di­dates al­so post­ed im­proved grades in 2023, with 58.6 per cent scor­ing more than 50 per cent and 13.5 per cent ranked be­low 30 per cent.  

A measly in­crease in the num­ber of pass­ing CAPE en­tries and less than 60 per cent of SEA stu­dents scor­ing over 50 per cent, with 13.5 per cent scor­ing be­low 30 per cent, and Im­bert is moved to bring that to our at­ten­tion as an achieve­ment. This is def­i­nite­ly not an ac­cept­able eval­u­a­tion of a school sys­tem de­signed to en­sure stu­dents suc­ceed.

Ob­vi­ous­ly, we need more da­ta and in­for­ma­tion, not all of which need­ed to be in­clud­ed in the state­ment–like the num­ber of stu­dents reg­is­tered for the SEC and CAPE ex­ams, the per­cent­ages of them pass­ing dif­fer­ent num­bers of sub­jects, how the Gov­ern­ment de­ter­mines what “good” per­for­mance is, and how they plan to mit­i­gate poor per­for­mance. In par­tic­u­lar, we need to know how many stu­dents are leav­ing sec­ondary school with­out any sub­jects (that is, with­out any em­ploy­able skills or know-how), how they move on ed­u­ca­tion­al­ly, and how they dis­trib­ute them­selves in the avail­able oc­cu­pa­tions, whether le­gal or il­le­gal.

We al­so need to dis­cuss, much more ex­ten­sive­ly than we have, bold claims such as the fol­low­ing made by Im­bert:

 “We have been en­sur­ing that the de­mands of our econ­o­my are ful­ly met. Tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion rep­re­sents an im­por­tant route for skills de­vel­op­ment and im­prov­ing tran­si­tion to the labour mar­ket, there­by boost­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for de­cent jobs and bet­ter lives for our young peo­ple. We are es­tab­lish­ing al­ter­na­tive sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment path­ways, and we are do­ing so through tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al pro­grammes.

“Our ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions have been cre­at­ing a pool of in­di­vid­u­als ca­pa­ble of chart­ing the fu­ture in a grow­ing econ­o­my. Some with en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it have been able to set up com­pa­nies and cre­ate jobs as em­ploy­ers. In this process, the qual­i­ty of life of our cit­i­zens has been con­sis­tent­ly im­proved.”

It seems to me that Im­bert is strain­ing our creduli­ty when he claims that the Gov­ern­ment is en­sur­ing that the de­mands of the econ­o­my are “ful­ly met”, and is re­ly­ing on TVET pro­grammes to fill the gaps.

What does he ex­pect us to un­der­stand here? That the pro­grammes will be de­vel­oped and de­liv­ered out­side of the main­stream cur­ricu­lum? That the rel­e­vant num­ber of teach­ers will be ed­u­cat­ed and trained in Fis­cal 2024? That the econ­o­my is be­ing ad­e­quate­ly di­ver­si­fied and that we should be­lieve that a cur­ricu­lum tied to good jobs and di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my will be read­i­ly man­age­able by stu­dents im­paired by the sys­tem for five long years and/or de­nied Sixth-Form ed­u­ca­tion?

Where are these in­di­vid­u­als right now who are ca­pa­ble of “chart­ing the fu­ture in a grow­ing econ­o­my”? Where are the “al­ter­na­tive sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment path­ways” be­ing es­tab­lished, and are the cam­pus­es al­ready equipped for the pur­pose? In­deed, what counts as al­ter­na­tive?

The Gov­ern­ment promis­es us con­sul­ta­tions on the stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of text­books in 2024. But what about con­sul­ta­tions on what is to be prop­er­ly treat­ed as TVET and its role in sav­ing our de­railed young peo­ple and di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my?

Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in T&T and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He has al­so writ­ten thou­sands of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com.