CAREER ENHANCEMENT PROGRAMME WILL EXPAND TO 54 MORE SCHOOLS

  April 15 2010

 CAREER ENHANCEMENT PROGRAMME WILL EXPAND

TO 54 MORE SCHOOLS

Prime Minister Bruce Golding says that the Ministry of Education's Career Enhancement Programme (CEP) will be expanded to 54 new schools this year. The programme allows school leavers who have insufficient qualifications to spend two additional years gaining life earning skills.

"We started out in eleven schools last year involving 1,000 students. That cohort will have another year of training, but it has been going very well and in September of this year we intend to extend that to 54 new schools across the island capturing these 16-year olds when they are going into this nothingness."

Mr. Golding was addressing the Jamaica launch of Obra, a Youth: Work project of the USAID and the Youth International Foundation in Kingston on Wednesday, April 14.

The Prime Minister said that the CEP programme, now a year old, has a cohort of 1500 students in eleven schools all of whom have one more year to complete the programme. The programme is a project of three agencies of the Ministry of Education: HEART Trust/NTA, the Jamaica Foundation for Lifelong Learning (JFLL) and the National Youth Service (NYS).

Highlighting the need for families to motivate children to learn, he said, "We need to create a new hunger in our children for knowledge.... How can we get more out of the programmes that we have and the resources that are available? We need a very deliberate strategic intense focus on building consciousness and inculcating in those young people a sense of responsibility...How can we light that fire of excitement to get our children as partners in that learning process....so often we forget that the most important part of the process is the student," Mr. Golding said.

The Obra project emerged from a commitment by the USA at the Summit of the Americas in 2009 to "form private and public partnership that will raise awareness of youth at risk issues and strengthen youth services to improve education, employment prospects and lifelong skills for young people throughout the region.

Noting the importance of Obra to youth in the region, Mr. Golding called on the youth development organizations to focus on inspiring young people to pursue education and to shoulder responsibility. He noted that in Jamaica about 38,000 youth leave schools with two subjects or less; 16,000 of this number have no academic or skill qualifications.