The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion is seek­ing greater part­ner­ships with schools and pri­vate-sec­tor busi­ness­es. This was an­nounced by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly on Tues­day at the cook-off rounds of the I-EAT com­pe­ti­tion spon­sored by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and by Nu­trien, at the Preysal High School. 

Gads­by-Dol­ly said young peo­ple are not tak­ing full ad­van­tage of the op­por­tu­ni­ties avail­able to them.

“The ques­tion is what do we do about it as a coun­try be­cause if we al­low our young peo­ple to go astray then we are af­fect­ing the fu­ture of T&T and ed­u­ca­tion is the biggest op­por­tu­ni­ty that is af­ford­ed to our young peo­ple but our ed­u­ca­tion has to look dif­fer­ent in 2024 from how it looked in 1960, 1965, be­cause our chil­dren are dif­fer­ent, our so­ci­ety is dif­fer­ent.”  

Gads­by-Dol­ly said the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion can­not trans­form the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem with­out the as­sis­tance of the com­mu­ni­ty and cor­po­rate T&T.

“We need the help of cor­po­rate T&T, civ­il so­ci­ety, we need the help of every­one to deal with our prob­lem that we are fac­ing and in this re­gard the Adopt-a-School pro­gramme was con­cep­tu­alised to for­malise the col­lab­o­ra­tion and part­ner­ship with the Min­istry with cor­po­rate T&T,” she said. 

She not­ed young peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ing in ed­u­ca­tion­al ac­tiv­i­ties augers well with their par­tic­i­pa­tion in aca­d­e­m­ic ac­tiv­i­ties.

“Our chil­dren, our stu­dents need ex­pe­ri­ences, they need to do dif­fer­ent things and that's through ed­u­ca­tion. Ed­u­ca­tion is not about the cer­tifi­cate, it's about prepar­ing cit­i­zens for life, and in T&T we want to de­vel­op the ide­al T&T cit­i­zen.” 

Over 70 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools par­tic­i­pat­ed in the I-EAT pro­gramme. 

On­ly sec­ondary schools par­tic­i­pat­ed in the cook-out rounds of the event. The five fi­nal­ists in the cook-out round in­clude Par­vati Girls Hin­du Col­lege, Mor­vant Laven­tille Sec­ondary, Mu­cara­po West Sec­ondary, Siparia West Sec­ondary and Biche Sec­ondary.