CPCE to have online school soon –Min. Manickchand

Minister of Education, Hon. Priya Manickchand says the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) will soon have a full online school to train teachers countrywide.  The Minister made this announcement on Friday, on the side-lines of another event.

Currently, the CPCE is hosting classes virtually due to the pandemic. However, Minister Manickchand said the initiative to offer a full online programme would allow a faster transformation of the education sector as it would enable more teachers to access training and, consequently more trained teachers to enter the school system.

“We are going to be launching off at CPCE, a full online school…We don’t mean teaching on the internet alone with Zoom, we mean it’s a full online school with books and resources and you can register there and tutoring will happen there,” she said.

Minister Manickchand said the objective is to provide training opportunities for teachers in remote areas, who are interested in becoming qualified.

“The teacher at Kaikan on the border with Venezuela that has been teaching there for eight years, but can’t leave there to come here to get trained at CPCE, we’ll train her online. The teacher at Paruima in Region Seven who wants to be trained but can’t leave there, we will train online,” she said.

The Minister expressed her hope that the services offered will be extended regionally and internationally. She noted that the CPCE has already seen an increase in the number of applications with this new initiative.

“So instead of seeing 800 as our intake, we have already gotten about 2,000 applications for this year so, I just want to point out how this kind of revolutionary move is going to allow us to offer mass training and retraining and upgrading to our teachers.”

Minister Manickchand said the Government’s overall objective is to ensure that there are teachers in the system who have received the requisite training to effectively educate the nation’s children.