 Welcome back to our special discussion with Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Chastney as we look back at 2019. In this segment we devote in time to education. Prime Minister, in the last year the government has been advancing efforts to modernize the school curriculum and teaching methods. The goal, Prime Minister, as you stated in your budget address is to raise the pass rate and provide our young people with skills that will enable them to find rewarding and productive work. And we've often heard that we have a sort of mismatch when it comes to that in St. Lucia. It's also a point that the IMF made in its article for consultation report where it said that enhancing labor market performance and productivity would require a better alignment of the education system with labor market needs. So let's take a look at some of the achievements in the education sector over the last year and then we will have that full discussion on this matter. Efforts of modernizing the school curriculum and teaching methods advanced in 2019 with a student-centered approach. Education Minister Dr. Gail Rigobot revealed that the Ministry of Education had undertaken a number of initiatives that catered to that including subject specialization at the primary school level. The approach also resulted in the opening of the National Sports Academy. 33 students enrolled in the St. Lucia Sports Academy which officially launched in September. It is the first and only school on island to place focus on sporting disciplines including cricket, football and track and field along with the traditional academic subjects. Delia Charles is the principal. Too often we have spoken about one size fits all and we cannot meet the needs of the students and the talents of the students. So the Ministry of Education decided to create something new, something different and to give these children with the sporting abilities that facility where they can balance both academics and sports right there on one compound. The government of St. Lucia partnered with the Caribbean Development Bank to fund a four-year scholarship program for teachers. The program forms part of the Education Quality Improvement Project Equip which is geared towards enhancing capacity to improve teacher quality, relevance of education and instructional effectiveness across the education sector. You will have observed based on the areas highlighted that we are catering for the multiple intelligences of our students. We are moving away from a very universal and one size fits all curriculum to catering for our students who have various talents, who are gifted, who may have learning difficulties and to ensure that indeed no child is left behind. Pertra Jerson who is attending the Micro University College in Jamaica is among the 18 individuals who received scholarships in 2019. Jan Promise and myself, we are going to complete our master's in social work and counselling and we hope to come back and to implement what we've learnt. It is an area which is much needed within the education sector and we will be able to work alongside the Ministry of Education in terms of achieving the goals, overall goals of the ministry. So I am excited like I said, I'm happy and proud and again I say thanks on behalf of everyone for extending this opportunity to all of us. The Cabinet of Ministers endorsed the ICT in Education Policy and Strategy for St. Lucia 2019 to 2022. The policy framework provides structure to the implementation of plans and activities related to ICT in Education including adequate infrastructure at schools and training for teachers. To achieve this, a cooperation agreement was signed with the Republic of China Taiwan for a three-year ICT in Education project. And the ICT in Education project is to facilitate teachers to teach their students how to use this key. In addition to providing ICT equipment for five selected primary and secondary schools in St. Lucia, the ICT Education project will focus on the capacity building for seed teachers to design courses, model and apply ICT into their ordinary teaching program through a series of training workshops. The governments of St. Lucia and Cuba also strengthened collaboration in education. An agreement with the Ministry of Education and the Cuban government paved the way for bilateral cooperation in the field of youth adult literacy through the application of the Yes I Can program and curriculum design implementation. We have been engaging with the Cuban government and our system ministry in particular with respect to curriculum review in the area of mathematics and literacy. And last year you will recall that we had some dialogue on the Yes I Can project which we wish to replicate here in St. Lucia. And today's activity signals the express commitment on the part of both governments to see that this project does come to fruition. Beside all the areas in which we have a cooperation right now between both governments, now we are ready to work in the field of education. And we are ready for that. Particularly this year, and taking into consideration that in some days that will be the 40th anniversary of the independence of St. Lucia and in some months that will be the 40th anniversary of our bilateral relationship we symbolically give very importance to this agreement because we give the opportunity to strengthen the cooperation in a particular field like education which is very important for the future. Following the official signing, the Yes I Can program was launched in Canaries. The Community ICT Access Center was also rebranded as an Innovation and Career Development Center. The Ministry in collaboration with the Caribbean Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Organization CARISSTEM hosted a week-long series of workshops in the use of Raspberry Pi devices for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Learning. The overall goal was to introduce the Raspberry Pi as a platform to integrating technology in the classroom. So this is a very important step we are taking because we want to be able to integrate more of these technologies in learning in general but also to give young people, our students a window into the future into what the potential is for career opportunities that may lie ahead. The Ministry provided continued support to the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in 2019. The institution in a renewed thrust commissioned the new home for the Department of Health Sciences as it prepares to offer the Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing. The dedicated space, the lab space is necessary, are necessary for not just cognitive learning but the honing of technical skills which is necessary in the nursing profession. We are grateful to the Ministry of Education for allowing the College the use of this building to add to our growing number of offerings as we continue to meet our mandate of providing quality education for this institution public. We thank the Ministry for its continued support in realizing our objectives as a tertiary institution. But I must applaud the Board for recognizing that still more had to be done and had to be done with greater urgency. And that is why my colleagues at the Ministry and other stakeholders agreed that perhaps it would make good sense to afford you the opportunity to use what was previously known as the Camdo Building. Twenty-five officers underwent training to serve and protect students, teachers and staff within school compounds. The initiative is a collaborative effort of the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development and the Royal St. Lucia Police Force. It is paramount that we provide our officers with the kind of training that would allow them to perform their jobs effectively and also to allow them to protect themselves and school property. The Ministry also pursued an initiative called the Model Safe Schools Program. The Gordon and Walcott Primary School piloted the program with students being trained in basic safety procedures, hazard analysis, first aid and fire safety. Prime Minister, we saw that the Sports Academy, the National Sports Academy featuring prominently there in that video on education. I know this is something that you championed over the last three years. Seeing it come into fruition must have been something exciting for you. Amazing. You know, I'm a huge sports fanatic and I grew up playing a lot of sports and I understood what sports did for me in terms of developing friendships but in character building, you know, conflict resolution, competitiveness and if you want to succeed teamwork because I played basketball, I did track which was individual but we also had relays and I also played Canadian football. So I understand what it means and I think that in order to succeed today we have kids who are ready through a natural ability excelling but need now to go to the next level. And the way to do that is by having a sports academy in which they actually can stay in the school. So I went to boarding school. So you wake up in the morning, you do a workout, you go to breakfast, you go to school up until one o'clock, two o'clock and then now the rest of the day is spent playing sports. It also means that you can have a concentration of excellence. You have your discipline coach whether it's track, whether it's table tennis, whether it's tennis, whether it's swimming, whether it's basketball, whether it's cricket or football. You then also have a nutritionist. You have physical therapy and you have also psychology. So there's a lot that goes into sports these days that it's going to be impossible for kids who are looking to go to the next level to excel at. So the sports that we had was really primarily into school and then clubs and even with the clubs that was grossly inadequate. This is the first part of getting this major sports program off the ground and the goal is that the discipline coach as well as the supporting staff will now become the training to train the trainers. So the other part that we're doing is building facilities around the island in order to encourage development of more clubs. And this is where I'm specifically appealing to the parents. So I played basketball here in Celusia, both on the national team and also on a club basis. We had to organize the tournaments. We had to get the referees. We had to get the scorekeepers. We had to put all the announcements out. We had to raise our monies when we were traveling. That's not how it's supposed to be. Kids are supposed to focus on playing the sports and this is where the parents now are volunteering their time and people say, I can't work in Celusia. Well, it's working at the Aquatic Center. One facility and they have seven or eight clubs and the parents are the ones that do all the organizing around it. They become coaches. They become referees. They help with the supervision of the kids behind the scenes. But now you have seven or eight teams in one facility which means that there could be more regular competitions between them. If in fact you're going to bring teams from outside, one or two, then there are still four or five teams that can compete against them. Now imagine if we have properly scheduled seasons for football and cricket and basketball and swimming and tennis and that the kids now can focus on that and we have now zones in which there are eight or nine clubs in each zone. Therefore, there are eight or nine teams competing in that zone. Once you make it through your zonal championship, you can go now to a regional championship and then to a national championship. It is that competition that drives success. Much like what we see happen to Jamaica's athletics. I was just going to say that. Absolutely. And I keep on saying that story. The most amazing part about Jamaican athletics, which there are many, but the one that's the most amazing for me is that Usain Bolt did not start off in track. A coach identified his talent and the same coach that coached him in high school is the same coach that coached him all the way through his career. So that's significant. A Jamaican high school coach was able to bring somebody to that international level and become record-breaking, become a legend. So that's just amazing to me. That's really what we want to get. You have to focus on the quality of the coaching, the facilities, the money that's going into it, the parents who are volunteering to make all of these things happen. So we've decided let's choose some key disciplines. A discipline must be gender-neutral, boys and girls. It must offer an opportunity for scholarships and it must offer an opportunity for professional leagues. So the number one sport in football, and I'm really sorry to say this, is football. Women and men, fastest growing sport in America. So in terms of scholarships, lots of scholarships, and it has the most professional leagues of any other sport in the world. So are we talking soccer or... Soccer. Okay, very well. So I was speaking the solution version of football. Yes, yes. Just to be clear, an international stage, right? Correct. So again, now if you have clubs around the country that are offering football at both the primary level and the secondary level, boys and girls, and then you now have proper coaching and then you have regular training programs to continue to improve the coaching. You have regular tournaments that are taking place so you can start seeing who the top kids are. The top kids now can go to the academy, right? And now even hone their skills even more. And therefore, those are the kids that have the opportunity of getting a scholarship. Because not everybody is going to get a sporting scholarship. You have to have the academics, as well as you have to have the talent. But what's great about America is you have Division I, Division II, and Division III schools. So there's a lot of opportunities for kids, but we just got to continue to push that envelope to make sure that they are as talented as we possibly can get. Now once a couple of them make it through the system and become professional, they become brand ambassadors for San Lucia. So everywhere they go, people are going to recognize, wow, they came from San Lucia. Look at the recognition at Iceland. 330,000 people have received for just qualifying into the World Cup. What Jamaica's reggae boys did in football. So when you come from a small island, people are always astonished when you're able to succeed at that international level. So one of the people that I love is this young lady, Julian Alfred. She had to leave San Lucia. And so she had to be away from her parents. She excelled, she's now at the University of Texas, really proud of the fact that she ran an amazing 60 meters a couple of weeks ago. But I'm hoping that we will see eventually that our solution doesn't have to leave to be able to get to that level. Now we could provide it right here at home. And speaking about being able to provide within the education sector, you spoke quite passionately about enhancing the skill sets within our teachers. And we saw a big move with that under the Education Quality Improvement Program equipped where 18 teachers receive scholarships. And they are now studying at the BSc level, Masters level and so forth. So that is a positive in the direction of being able to give our teachers the sort of tools that they need in order to be able to push the envelope of the education sector here. First of all, I want to really commend many of the teachers who on their own have been getting university degrees and getting higher level of education. I mean, it's incredibly commendable. But it's a huge sacrifice on their part. Because even though some of them get some form of pay increase, it's never commensurate with what the cost is to go to that next level. So I just want to say hats off to them and we should all, you know, bring an apple every day to our teachers and hug them. We should bring a banana. A banana. Absolutely. Sorry, you're right. A banana. But there's a new way of measuring children's learning abilities. So in America, they used to have what's called the standard achievement test, SATs. And then there's this new one. I can't remember what the acronym was, but basically what it does, it measures creative thinking or critical thinking. As most people believe it, that's singularly the most important component in measuring the success of our education system. And the countries that are always on top, Singapore, Finland, South Korea, are always topping the list and Canada has been coming up significantly. So when I look at Finland and how they've done it, basically to become a teacher is more difficult than becoming a doctor or a lawyer. And you get paid as well as in those areas. And in most classrooms, there's three teachers. So there's a very skilled teacher that deals with kids problems, dyslexia. What's it called? When you have difficulty in concentrating. Yeah, attention deficit disorder. Attention deficit disorder. And the teachers are so well educated they're able to help those kids. And there's two other teachers that are making sure that the more advanced kids are not being limited and anybody else who needs help. And that has delivered this successful program. Now the reality is, is that we can't afford that. And it will be a long time before we can afford to do that. We are actually seeing a decline in the number of students. Significant. In 1995, there was 32,000 primary school students. Today is 16. We have more teachers today than we had in 1995. Yeah. And we spend the most amount of money in our budget on education. And in the education budget in excess of 85% of what we spend is on salaries. So there is no capacity to move that number anymore. And so therefore we're going to have to find different ways to be able to do that. So the introduction IE of e-books. So we were critical of the former government when they brought in laptops as an example. Every kid wants a laptop. But how was it going to really help in terms of the overall goal of what we're trying to be able to achieve when that laptop had no software program, when the teachers weren't taught how to use this as a teaching tool. And there was actually no mechanism that was set up to repair the laptops because every single year they were getting the laptops from a different source. So there's an Indian company that provided and producing these e-books. It's been introduced in Antigua. I think the BVI and some of the other islands in Jamaica are about to introduce it. We're introducing it this year in Form 3. And the e-book has a hard case on it, has a keypad on it. It accesses the internet so it can be live on the internet or the work that you do is stored and then when you get into an internet zone it downloads it. It now will download all of your books. So I mean all the young ladies who I met in my constituency who are complaining about having to carry these bags back home everything now will be in this e-book. The e-book also has software to be able to assist the teacher. So it will tell the teacher how much time a student spent reading a chapter. It will grade the homework and also the teacher now has the ability of knowing whether the child had the homework. Because parents out there you need to let your child do the homework because that's how they're able to learn and you can know that. All the communication between the teacher and the student is recorded. So both it is an administrative tool as well as a learning tool. All the books now have links online in order to be able to help the students. Now what we want to do is we want to eventually compliment that by taking our best teachers in biology and physics and math and having them record their lessons. So like me I was never very good at concentrating in class you can always go back and listen to what the teacher has to say. And so it's through that system by getting the best teachers making them available to the kids making learning fun again and allowing the teacher now to get that administrative support so they can spend more time actually teaching. And it's to start now looking at what's the modern school look like. What's the school of the future going to look like? So I mean I think out of the box you know and I was not the greatest student so I always challenged the system considerably. When you get out in life do you spend time with kids who are always your same age? So why should we be in a school system in which you're spending all your time with just kids your age? Why don't we learn to interact with older kids and maybe the experiences of the older kids can help the younger kids and the younger kids perspective on something else. And so all of a sudden if we have learning centers instead of having schools now we've not made that decision but I'm just saying to you this is the kind of thought process that we're challenging people to say because we're a small island and this idea of becoming a smart island is to use technology for our assistance and to understand that we don't have the same resources and at the same time we don't have the same problems that bigger countries do and so by trying to emulate bigger countries whatever advantages we have as a small country we're not using them and I think that we have to do a much better job so without boring you let me retract one second in terms of training people which is what the IMF was talking about and also the World Bank and certainly we see it ourselves 85% of people who are going to be working at SELUSHA are going to work in what we call the service sector financial sector, commercial sector hospitality sector and that the organizational structure in all of those sectors are pretty much the same line staff supervisor, middle management and senior staff so how many people starting off line staff are going to make it to middle management over their career and how many people who make it to supervisor are going to make it to middle management over their career and how many people who make it to middle management are going to make it to senior management and then therefore what are the requirements for you to make it to the different levels do you need to have a university degree to be a line staff person do you need a university degree to be a supervisor do you need a university degree management. Now because people might say I'm committing heresy and I'm trying to deprive our kids of a global university education system, step back for a moment. Two of the most successful and productive industrial countries in the world, Switzerland and Germany, the vast majority of people don't have university degrees. What they're doing is getting associate degrees and improving skill sets. So what I want to be able to do, what the country wants to be able to do, is to say how can you remain as line staff but and earn an income that becomes an income that's sufficient to allow you to own a home, to be able to make investments and go on vacation. The only way is by improving your skill sets. So if you're going to be a waiter, it's learning languages, it's learning how to understand different cultures, it's being able to understand food ingredients in terms of understanding allergies. So when a person comes there, you're not simply clearing the table but you're actually becoming part of that overall experience. The value to the restaurant is that people are going to want to come back because I can guarantee you when you get a world-class waiter, you know the difference right away. So we need to look at being a teller, being in a grocery store, being in a gas station in terms of how do we develop careers for people and which becomes substantially more affordable. This is where Sir Arthur Lewis and online training becomes a great example in terms of helping develop associate degrees and that also don't break the bank for the families. In our remaining moments, we want to talk quickly about the rehabilitation of schools. Lots of money allocated there, some region of ten million dollars allocated in the last year or two years. 25 million in the last two years. Being able to fix the problem, because it is a problem, but we still had pockets of dissatisfaction. Is it too much of a hooligan task to try to fix the school, the national school plans? It's not, it's just a matter of money. So previous governments were allocating about a million dollars a year to maintain schools. So let's bring that down to a hard example. The Mondeau school built in 1982. When we went up to see it with the minister, the roof had not been replaced, the roof was leaking. It was leaking to the extent that when it was raining, the teachers would go on the balcony with the kids. Bathrooms were a mess. The railings were a mess. It just was deplorable. You know why? They were getting 4,000 EC dollars a year for maintenance. Now think of it. 500 kids running around, 600 kids running around and 4,000 EC dollars a year. So what happens is the asset continues to deteriorate. Now if I am a teacher or I'm a principal or I'm even a student and you have politicians talking about world-class education and you're very important to me and the facilities we're in are worse than third world. It just makes it impossible. Now there's 140 plus schools in St. Lucia. So when we came in there was a report that had been commissioned which said that at minimum we needed to spend 40 million dollars to be able to upgrade the schools physically back to some kind of minimum standard. We're not talking about world-class. We're talking about getting them back to a minimum standard. Getting the washrooms. I mean we went to a school souffle. There was no doors. No doors in the classrooms. So people were literally coming in and taking furniture. How did kids feel safe in that kind of environment? So we have started that process. We've spent 25 million. We're going to spend another 10 million dollars this year bringing it up to 35 million dollars. But some of the schools are agent and then the other one that nobody wants to hear about is the merging of schools. One physically that some schools have deteriorated to the point. It's not worth it or makes sense to spend money on fixing them but the fact is that we have to merge schools because we don't have enough students and some of the other schools. So it's working out perfectly. Now the question becomes again as a small island if we can have more online and we can do homework collectively together and therefore people don't have to commute as far as they were going before because I don't need to see you on a daily basis like we've had before. The most important part is that you're doing the work and I do regular testing to make sure that you're actually the one that's doing this work. So we've challenged the education system to review how we're executing education and come up with innovative ideas and I'm really grateful to the World Bank and in particular for making their experiences in other countries available to us and making that determination. We've also signed up with the World Economic Forum that do Davos in terms of how do we now fund SDGs and part of that is new ideas innovative ideas to be able to solve our problems. You've just been watching our special discussion with Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Shastri as we look back at 2019. This is where we come to the end of the first hour. Stay with us because coming up in our second hour we focus on health and tourism. I'm Minister Joseph. Join us for the second hour.