THE education sector’s budget includes an allocation of over $500 million to enhance the capacity of the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) to go fully online with its teachers’ training programme.

Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, made this announcement during her presentation on day three of the national budget debates.
Minister Manickchand said that the initiative will allow for thousands of teachers across the country to access training, as part of the government’s plans to improve the quality of learning outcomes in all educational institutions.

The aim, she said, is to achieve 100 per cent trained teachers or teachers in training by 2025.
“We were able to move our intake at CPCE from 536 to 3,000, giving the Amerindian teachers a chance to get degrees in education and not just trained teachers’ certificate,” she said.

The minister said when the government was elected to office in August 2020, there were no plans in place to reopen the CPCE.
This year, the teachers’ training college produced its largest batch of trained teachers.

Principal of CPCE, Dr. Viola Rowe, was reported as saying: “The January 2022 graduating class now holds the record of the largest graduating batch with its 843 trained teachers, of which 198 are early childhood trained, 404 primary trained, and 241 qualified for the secondary level.”

She added that, of the 843 graduates, 198 pursued the Trained Teacher’s Certificate (TTC) Programme and 645 pursued the Associate Degree (ADE) in Education Programme.

Dr. Rowe said that during the reporting period, the college experienced an astronomically high demand for teacher education with an enrolment of 2,664 first-year applicants.

The Principal said that before the 2021 reporting period, the online application was unavailable, and this perhaps restricted knowledge and applications for potential applicants.

Further, she said that enrollment size was restricted due to physical space and dormitory capacity for pre-service learners.
She said that the college experienced the effectiveness of technology as a contributor to the number of applications received online for the reporting period.

Dr. Rowe said that the increase in teacher demand is also credited to the clarion call by the Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, for all untrained teachers to register at the college in keeping with the strategic plan to have 100 per cent trained teachers in the education system.

She said too that the college continued to operate its 19 centres across the ten administrative regions with some programmes being expanded.