E-books, school construction promised for 2025Education gets $7.5B allocation

Senior Multimedia Reporter

joshua.seemungal@guardian.co.tt

Within the last few weeks, Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly and her ministry have come under public pressure about the poor infrastructure of some schools. However, in his budget speech yesterday, Finance Minister Colm Imbert sought to assure parents of affected students that many schools will be repaired, while new schools will be constructed in the coming fiscal year. Reading out a list of schools that underwent repairs and construction over the last four years, he promised that Government would prioritise school infrastructure improvement programmes.

“In 2025, construction will continue on several other new schools, with maintenance and repair of existing schools given the highest priority. Specifically, the Ministry of Education’s 2025 budgetary allocation will be supplemented with special purpose loan financing to allow urgently needed school repairs to be executed by a State enterprise at a prompt and timely manner,” he said without giving more details about the loan.

In addressing other educational programmes to be rolled out in fiscal 2025 for the education sector, which received an allocation of $7.512 billion, Minister Imbert said Government plans to continue its attempts to create a digital education ecosystem.

Imbert stated that the first part of that plan, a numeracy adaptive learning platform, would be launched in January 2025.

“This innovative platform will facilitate the creation of a diagnostic database and tailored numeracy experiences to foster numeracy development, remediation and progress monitoring for all students,” the minister said.

Imbert said the second part of the digital education system was an E-book platform to be launched next June.

“The integration of an E-book platform into our education system will transition education and learning from a text-book dependent and instructor-centred approach to a more interactive and student-centric paradigm.

This initiative will offer cost-effective learning resources, promote equitable access to quality education materials. The implementation of this platform guarantees access to e-textbooks, electronic textbooks covering all subject areas taught in primary and secondary schools, thereby preparing our students for the digital era,” he announced.

Minister Imbert also announced the continuation of the school feeding programme, GATE, the school rural transport programme, the vacation revision programme, and the $1,000 school supplies and book grant.

In an immediate reaction after the budget presentation, the President of the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers Association, TTUTA, Martin Lum Kin described the presentation of education programmes as nothing new.

He said the promises to improve school infrastructure and provide an e-book platform were promising steps.

“However, we would have had promises in the past, but we are optimistic but cautiously optimistic and we are hoping that will bear some fruit over the fiscal year.

“In terms of e-books, we have heard of that previously and we have not seen it borne any sort of fruition. So we are hoping that within this fiscal year that it can happen. But we are not sure how it’s going to be implemented,”he said. Calling for an Early Childhood Care and Education component to be considered, the TTUTA boss called for transparency concerning the project’s creation and implementation.

“We are hoping that it will not be a matter of giving to their financiers these contracts, but they will be given to the best possible agency or institutions to implement,” he said.

Lum Kin welcomed the return of the $1,000 school supplies and book grant, as well as GATE funding. However, he said the union hoped that educators would have been granted access to GATE to advance their skills.

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