Education allocation drops by $743M

Ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing has been al­lo­cat­ed $8.033 bil­lion in the 2027 Bud­get, a $743 mil­lion re­duc­tion from the pre­vi­ous fis­cal year, rais­ing con­cerns among ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers about whether schools will have the re­sources need­ed to main­tain stan­dards and sup­port stu­dents.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo an­nounced the al­lo­ca­tion dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, out­lin­ing new ini­tia­tives in­clud­ing $100 mil­lion for lap­tops for school­child­ren and $6.6 mil­lion for the AI in Ed­u­ca­tion Pro­gramme, NEXTCLASS TT and EL­E­VATE TT.

Oth­er pro­grammes out­lined in­clude the PEARL ini­tia­tive, aimed at as­sist­ing 16,000 chil­dren with cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, as well as en­hanced dig­i­tal ed­u­ca­tion­al and elec­tron­ic learn­ing re­sources tar­get­ing 200,000 stu­dents, 12,000 teach­ers and 1,500 ad­min­is­tra­tors.