Education Ministry’s Region Four Prioritising Career Readiness in 2025/26 Academic Year

Regional Director for Region Four of the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, Dr. Michele Pinnock, says career education will be a central focus in schools across the region during the 2025/26 academic year.

“We want to focus, as a region, on a purpose-driven kind of living, and we are focusing specifically on career guidance and education,” she told JIS News.

According to Dr. Pinnock, the goal is to introduce students to a broad spectrum of career options from an early stage.

“We want to be able to speak to our children as early as early childhood about various careers, and we’re hoping that we’d be able to do a lot of vision boarding. So our children, from the primary through secondary levels, will be exposed to different careers, of course, new and emerging careers,” she stated.

The Regional Director further noted that schools will be leveraging strategic partnerships with key stakeholders to provide students with authentic, real-world exposure and career-relevant insights.

“This is where we’re going to be collaborating with our community so that some of our stakeholders are able to come in and really have conversations with our students, in terms of what their [career choices] are and how did they get to where they are,” she said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Pinnock welcomed the addition of new buses to serve schools in the Region under the Government’s Rural School Bus Programme, noting that the initiative will help improve attendance and punctuality.

“We’re looking forward to the bus rollout and we know that, in conjunction with the routes that we used to have and the bus services that we used to have, we will definitely see some improvements in terms of punctuality and attendance,” she said.

The Rural School Bus Programme is designed to provide affordable and reliable transportation for students in remote areas.

The initiative aims to reduce absenteeism, improve punctuality, and ease the financial challenges on parents who often struggle with high commuting costs.