JIS News- The pilot of Jamaica’s Ministry of Education and Youth’s School-to-Work Transition program, which seeks to prepare special needs students for the world of work, will commence in September 2023.
The 10-month exercise, which will run until June 2024, aims to expose the students to work experience and provide them with an opportunity for certification through HEART/NSTA Trust.
A total of 700 students in seven schools across the Ministry’s seven regions are being targeted.
During the pilot, the pupils will be exposed to various career options, fieldwork, workshops, and apprenticeship programs.
Education Officer in the Ministry’s Special Education Unit, Avarine Bradshaw, told JIS News that the main objective of the initiative is to empower special needs students with the requisite skills and tools to enable independent living in adulthood.
“[This is an] exciting time, because even though individual schools would have had some semblance of a school-to-work transition plan, there is no program throughout the system that would cater to children with special needs,” she said.
Participating institutions will include special needs schools that facilitate secondary-level education at grades 10, 11, 12, and 13, as well as schools with predominantly pathway-three students that is, students who are engaged in remedial education programs and are suspected to have learning disabilities but are undiagnosed.
“We are looking at those schools so that we may begin to introduce students to a kind of trajectory towards a career that they may find useful, and it may be useful to their communities,” Ms. Bradshaw said.
She noted that the initiative is significant, as it will enable greater inclusivity and access for special needs persons in the society.
“We wanted to start when children begin to have a more concrete idea of what their career interests will look like and to see how we support this child and the kind of social and… vocational skills that are needed – to see if the child needs to do an assessment or exam, and to support the child to get the best result from their performance in the exam,” she noted.
Under the School-to-Work Transition program, the Ministry will provide schools with vocational teachers, as well as provide training for principals and guidance counsellors. Support for parents is also to be provided.
“We hope that at the end of it, the student will be certified, so that they are ready to take on the world of work. We are prepared to support the students all the way until they leave high school and they are ready to enter the world-of-work and are ready for independent living,” Ms. Bradshaw said.
