Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing has been al­lo­cat­ed $8.033 bil­lion in the 2027 Bud­get, a $743 mil­lion re­duc­tion from the pre­vi­ous fis­cal year, rais­ing con­cerns among ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers about whether schools will have the re­sources need­ed to main­tain stan­dards and sup­port stu­dents.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo an­nounced the al­lo­ca­tion dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, out­lin­ing new ini­tia­tives in­clud­ing $100 mil­lion for lap­tops for school­child­ren and $6.6 mil­lion for the AI in Ed­u­ca­tion Pro­gramme, NEXTCLASS TT and EL­E­VATE TT.

Oth­er pro­grammes out­lined in­clude the PEARL ini­tia­tive, aimed at as­sist­ing 16,000 chil­dren with cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, as well as en­hanced dig­i­tal ed­u­ca­tion­al and elec­tron­ic learn­ing re­sources tar­get­ing 200,000 stu­dents, 12,000 teach­ers and 1,500 ad­min­is­tra­tors.

Tan­coo al­so men­tioned the con­struc­tion of Af­ter School Study Cen­tres cater­ing to stu­dents in Forms One to Three in 100 schools.

Be­fore the Bud­get read­ing, Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) pres­i­dent Crys­tal Ashe had called on the Gov­ern­ment to ad­dress the is­sue of over 200 teach­ers who were await­ing pay­ment for their 2020-2023 salary ar­rears.

He said ad­e­quate fund­ing to re­new the con­tracts of es­sen­tial per­son­nel in­clud­ing Busi­ness Op­er­a­tions As­sis­tants (BOAs), so­cial work­ers, guid­ance coun­sel­lors and safe­ty of­fi­cers should al­so be con­sid­ered a pri­or­i­ty.

“These per­son­nel pro­vide crit­i­cal sup­port to schools and stu­dents and gaps in these ser­vices place ad­di­tion­al pres­sure on teach­ers and ad­min­is­tra­tors.”

Re­fer­ring to the need for main­te­nance and in­fra­struc­tur­al up­grades, Ashe said it was “un­ac­cept­able” for schools to re­open with­out im­por­tant in­fra­struc­ture, ar­gu­ing that fund­ing should al­low the Min­istry to re­spond be­fore an emer­gency sit­u­a­tion de­vel­oped.

Guardian Me­dia sought a re­sponse from Ashe af­ter the bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion but did not re­ceive a re­sponse up to press time.

Mean­while, Na­tion­al Par­ent-Teacher As­so­ci­a­tion (NPTA) pres­i­dent Wal­ter Stew­art said while he took note of the slight­ly small­er bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion, he was hope­ful that it would not im­pact the qual­i­ty of ed­u­ca­tion ac­cessed by stu­dents na­tion­wide.

He main­tained that stan­dards and re­sources for pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion should re­main a high pri­or­i­ty, not­ing that fur­ther op­por­tu­ni­ties for cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship were need­ed.

“We on our bud­get wish­list hoped there could have been some ad­di­tion­al in­cen­tives to cor­po­rate Trinidad and To­ba­go who could be able to as­sist and sup­port the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem in so many ways so we would have a shared com­mit­ment to the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem to dri­ve the na­tion­al in­come in Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

Stew­art not­ed that the “re­al test” would be whether the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion would be able to con­sis­tent­ly de­liv­er or im­prove up­on cur­rent sys­tems even with the re­duced al­lo­ca­tion.

BUD­GETS AL­LO­CA­TIONS OVER THE YEARS

• 2026-2027: $8.033 bil­lion

• 2025-2026: $8.776 bil­lion

• 2024-2025: $7.512 bil­lion

• 2023-2024: $8.022 bil­lion

• 2022-2023: $7.453 bil­lion

• 2021-2022: $6.886 bil­lion

• 2020-2021: $7.973 bil­lion

• 2019-2020: $7.548 bil­lion