Richard?Lord

Leader of the Op­po­si­tion Dr Kei­th Row­ley says a re­port pre­pared by the UWI Fac­ul­ty of So­cial Sci­ences on the role of the Gov­ern­ment's mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar lap­top ini­tia­tive failed to sig­nif­i­cant­ly as­sist the stu­dents in their over­all per­for­mance.

Row­ley said so dur­ing a meet­ing of the PNM in Mal­oney on Wednes­day night.

The pro­gramme was in­tro­duced by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment, led by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, over the past five years to all stu­dents en­ter­ing sec­ondary schools,

He said the find­ings showed the project "has had no sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on the stu­dents' per­for­mance."

Row­ley said the re­port showed staff and stu­dent groups "in­di­cat­ed a rel­a­tive­ly high dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the pro­vi­sion of In­ter­net ser­vice and over­all struc­ture and im­ple­men­ta­tion of the pro­gramme."

The re­port rec­om­mend­ed a strate­gic plan be for­mu­lat­ed and im­ple­ment­ed for ICT in schools in the wider cur­ricu­lum.

Row­ley said that was a clear in­di­ca­tion that the Gov­ern­ment had in­tro­duced the pro­gramme "with no prop­er plan­ning."

He said the re­port iden­ti­fied weak­ness­es in the ex­ist­ing sys­tem, which in­clud­ed in­ad­e­quate teacher train­ing in the use of ICT in class­rooms, in­suf­fi­cient IT tech­ni­cal staff and no align­ment to school cur­ricu­lum in the T&T con­text.

How­ev­er, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh ques­tioned yes­ter­day why Row­ley would prof­fer the re­port of one re­searcher to make his claim.

He said the mat­ter should be de­ter­mined af­ter the work of sev­er­al re­searchers world­wide were looked at.

"I think he should fa­mil­iarise him­self with the over­all pic­ture of where ICT has been car­ried and its suc­cess­es. You can­not take one re­search pa­per find­ings and give a dom­i­nant state­ment on that," Gopeesingh added.

The min­is­ter was re­spond­ing to ques­tions on the is­sue dur­ing yes­ter­day's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, St Clair.