Education Ministry to Complete Roll Out of CEP this Year

The Ministry of Education is to complete the roll out of its Citizenship Education Programme (CEP) in primary and secondary schools this academic year.

“The programme focuses on the end product, who it is we want to come out of our educational system. We want to have good people, good citizens who have strong values and strong morals,” the CEP Co-ordinator, Margaret Brissett-Bolt told JIS News.

“We want persons who are patriotic and who understand the values that they bring to the country that will add value moving forward to achieve our Vision 2030 goal, so it is more of a strategy than a subject in the curriculum,” she added.

Mrs. Brissett-Bolt said the Education Ministry has been doing the ground work and is now ready to go into all the primary and secondary schools and teachers’ colleges.

The Co-ordinator further pointed out that the programme will engage parents, teachers, students, administrators and the school community through seven specific themes.

“These are voluntarism, order and orderliness, national pride, achievement, respect, celebration, and positive interaction and cohesion. So, for example, a school will select a theme that speaks to what it is they want to work on at a particular time. It’s a lot of collaboration and communication,” she informed.

“The CEP is a way of life. It’s how we go about behaving and accepting certain norms of behaviour, helping our students to be confident, self aware and to understand what it takes to be a good person. That is where we are going with our citizenship education,” Mrs. Brissett-Bolt noted.

According to the Co-ordinator, the official launch of the programme will be done in March 2011, as the team is currently fine tuning the programme.