And in brother education news, we asked about the new STEAM School. The President of the IDB and the Prime Minister visited the ongoing construction at the ITVET campus this week. And that got us to thinking whether STEAM is now taking pre-eminence over the long neglected vocational training. The Minister says there must be balance:
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"This is just the beginning in terms of these projects. Our hopes, plan and discussion with the IDB is to expand this across the country and to build six of these academies across the country so that people, wherever they live in our country, our young people can have access to STEAM education."
Jules Vasquez
"I believe that it was the PUP that spearheaded vocational training, the ITVET's perhaps because society has moved on. I didn't see the up taken that might have been expected."
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"It's one of my greatest disappointments that the UDP government did not take technical vocational education training seriously. They did nothing maybe because whole nonsense of a PUP project. They did nothing to invest in them, so when I visited them, these ITVET facilities - we have 6 of these across the country including the Cayo CET - this was a significant investment made back in 2002/2003 of close to 30 million dollars. They did nothing to upgrade the very same equipment that we had bought under that initial project was there. So we have young people for example learning auto mechanic using ancient equipment which, the vehicles that we are using now can't be fix with that type of equipment. So we have to invest in ITVET. Skills training is critically important. The skills gap is important to economic development, national development. So we have a special project that we are putting together for investing in the ITVETs along with STEAM education. Undoubtedly STEAM education is the way of the future, but we can't ignore ITVET's technical vocation education."
