Education allocation dips but more funding for AI and laptops

Shane Su­perville

While ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing con­tin­ues to re­ceive the largest al­lo­ca­tion in the na­tion­al bud­get, fund­ing for the sec­tor has dipped com­pared with the pre­vi­ous fis­cal year.

The sec­tor has been al­lo­cat­ed $8.033 bil­lion for fis­cal 2026-2027, $743 mil­lion less than the $8.776 bil­lion al­lo­cat­ed in 2025-2026.

De­spite the re­duc­tion, it re­mains the third-high­est al­lo­ca­tion to ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing over the past sev­en years.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo, dur­ing his Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion to­day, an­nounced sev­er­al new ini­tia­tives for the sec­tor, in­clud­ing $6.6 mil­lion for the AI in Ed­u­ca­tion Pro­gramme, NEXTCLASS TT and EL­E­VATE TT.

A fur­ther $100 mil­lion will be al­lo­cat­ed to pro­vide lap­tops for school­child­ren.

The fis­cal pack­age al­so in­cludes the PEARL ini­tia­tive, which will as­sist 16,000 chil­dren with cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, along with en­hanced dig­i­tal ed­u­ca­tion and elec­tron­ic learn­ing re­sources tar­get­ing 200,000 stu­dents, 12,000 teach­ers and 1,500 ad­min­is­tra­tors.

The Gov­ern­ment will al­so con­struct Af­ter School Study Cen­tres for stu­dents in Forms One to Three at 100 schools.

Tan­coo al­so out­lined mea­sures aimed at in­creas­ing parental in­volve­ment in ed­u­ca­tion, in­clud­ing train­ing 300 fa­cil­i­ta­tors for par­ent sup­port teams and cre­at­ing a Na­tion­al Par­ent Por­tal.

The Gov­ern­ment al­so plans to in­tro­duce a Parental Re­spon­si­bil­i­ty Act, which the Bud­get state­ment said would em­pha­sise ed­u­ca­tion and nur­tur­ing as a shared re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be­tween the home, school and state.

Ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing al­lo­ca­tions:

* 2026-2027: $8.033 bil­lion

* 2025-2026: $8.776 bil­lion

* 2024-2025: $7.512 bil­lion

* 2023-2024: $8.022 bil­lion

* 2022-2023: $7.453 bil­lion

* 2021-2022: $6.886 bil­lion

* 2020-2021: $7.973 bil­lion

* 2019-2020: $7.548 bil­lion