Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Michael Dowlath yes­ter­day an­nounced that schools will now re­open on Sep­tem­ber 8, 2025, fol­low­ing Cab­i­net’s ap­proval of a one-week ex­ten­sion to the Ju­ly-Au­gust va­ca­tion.

Speak­ing at the post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing, Dowlath said the ad­just­ment was made to en­sure a more bal­anced dis­tri­b­u­tion of weeks across the school terms.

“When we looked at the pre­vi­ous sched­ule, the first term would have had 15 weeks, the sec­ond term 12 weeks, and the third term 12 weeks. And what we did was to bal­ance the dis­tri­b­u­tion be­cause, you know, the first term is nor­mal­ly the longest one and every­body gets burned out, the teach­ers and the stu­dents and the par­ents,” he ex­plained.

He stressed that the aca­d­e­m­ic year would still com­prise 39 weeks, so no teach­ing time would be lost.

The ex­tend­ed break will al­so al­low the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry to com­plete ma­jor re­pairs and in­fra­struc­tur­al up­grades at 278 schools.

“It al­lows us to… en­sure that we could com­plete the ma­jor in­fra­struc­tur­al re­pairs and up­grades,” Dowlath said.

He al­so an­nounced that the Cab­i­net had ap­proved the hir­ing of 100 con­tract as­sis­tant in­struc­tors to ad­dress long-stand­ing va­can­cies in tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing (TVET) across 95 sec­ondary schools.

“Some of these posts, 165 of these posts, were va­cant over the last four years. The Gov­ern­ment is tak­ing this bold step to re­verse years of ne­glect of the TVET area and gov­er­nance in schools,” he said. “These con­tract po­si­tions will be pub­licly ad­ver­tised and the re­cruit­ment will be­gin im­me­di­ate­ly.”

The va­can­cies span 12 sub­ject ar­eas, in­clud­ing tech­ni­cal draw­ing (28 va­can­cies), in­dus­tri­al arts (29), food and nu­tri­tion (20), cloth­ing and tex­tiles (19), agri­cul­tur­al sci­ence (17), me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing (10), elec­tri­cal and elec­tron­ic tech­nol­o­gy (11), and vi­su­al and per­form­ing arts (11). The Ca­roni and Vic­to­ria dis­tricts record­ed the high­est gaps.

“This ap­proach to TVET is part of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion’s re­form agen­da, which po­si­tions TVET as cen­tral to work­force readi­ness, en­tre­pre­neur­ship, and na­tion­al di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion,” Dowlath said.

On the is­sue of school lead­er­ship, Dowlath con­firmed the min­istry is work­ing close­ly with the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (TSC) to ad­dress an­oth­er crit­i­cal short­age.

“At present, 85 of the 125 sec­ondary prin­ci­pal posts are va­cant,” he said. “The Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion is work­ing to fill all of these va­can­cies over the va­ca­tion pe­ri­od.”

Eigh­teen in­ter­views have al­ready been con­duct­ed for prin­ci­pals, while ap­point­ments of deans and heads of de­part­ment are al­so be­ing fast-tracked.

“We are work­ing very close­ly with the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion to fill as many of these va­can­cies for the new term,” Dowlath said.