Troupe urges students to board Sixth Form Pathways train
Published:Thursday | February 24, 2022 | 12:10 AMEdmund Campbell/Senior Parliamentary Reporter
The Ministry of Education and Youth is encouraging students to take advantage of some 20,000 unused spaces in tertiary institutions that the Government is prepared to fund under the Sixth Form Pathways Programme.
Education ministry officials revealed yesterday that the programme will cost the Government about $2 billion annually.
A reallocation of the budgets of the Career Advancement Programme and Centre of Occupational Studies will offset a significant portion of the cost, according to the ministry.
“Those students who lost this opportunity imposed by the pandemic, this is a chance to get attached to a tertiary institution. If you don’t want to go back into your high school environment, there is an opportunity to get fully funded support to improve your life’s chances,” said Dr Kasan Troupe, acting chief education officer.
An impassioned Troupe told members of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee yesterday that her personal view was that the Sixth Form Pathways Programme provided greater equity for high school students.
She argued that from as far back as 1968, students made use of the seven years of high school and benefited from the resources of the Government to make the transition to university.
“This programme has now enabled those students, those marginalised youth who were denied this opportunity because we failed to pivot the system over time to respond to these students,” Troupe said.
“For me, it is worthy, it is very critical because there were other students who saw this as a normal pathway,” she insisted.
The senior education ministry technocrat said that the mandatory seven-year programme has now created a level playing field for students who would have been denied an opportunity to achieve their full potential.
“I am using this opportunity to call on our parents to see the value of this investment. Education is that weapon that is going to break the cycle of poverty,” the acting chief education officer reasoned.
The importance of the extended school programme becomes even more critical as the education of students over the last two years has suffered setbacks owing to the pandemic.
“We now get a chance to maximise on the tertiary spaces. We have over 20,000 unused spaces in our tertiary institutions, and so we don’t necessarily need to build. We need to access.”
Currently, about 14,000 of the 38,000 grade 11 students transition to grades 12 and 13 or a recognised higher-education programme.
The education ministry is partnering with 19 private institutions to implement the Sixth Form Pathways Programme.