Skills upgrade

The Ministry of Education is looking at rebranding the Barbados Community College (BCC).After a tour of the BCC yesterday, Minister of Education Ronald Jones said his ministry wanted the college to stand out in Barbados and the wider Caribbean, “offering services beyond our shores”,  but that could only be done with “the right facilities”.  Jones said the ministry would also be “paying interest” to the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic and the Erdiston Teachers’ Training College.Their upgrading would be one of the major initiatives of The Higher Education Development Unit (HEDU) that would be working with the three institutions.He said one of the challenges was to move the BCC towards offering undergraduate programmes which had been requested by some Barbadians.Hopefully, this could be done over the next five years, he added.The minister identified physical education, nursing, fine arts, pharmacy and med-lab technology as some of the areas they were thinking of for further development. He said the creative industry was being looked at vigorously and there was currently a Cultural Industries Policy before Parliament.Jones said although the BCC was fairly constrained for space, there were some solutions, but money would also present challenges.“Even for a building on a 60 000 square foot space will be about $25 million, so we will have to do incremental work . . . ,” he said. Building atop the car park was “one of the ideas” considered but the Town Planning Department would first have to be notified of any intentions, Jones noted.Principal of the BCC, Dr Gladstone Best said strategies to keep the BCC at its best included development of the human resource capacity, the physical resources and the college’s programmes.Best said the music and theatre arts programmes were “ripe and ready forfurther development”.He also said they would hopefully move towards offering a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts as soon as possible.“That is an area where we know there is an acute shortage and that we need to get the programme going,” he said.Questioned about the mass communications programme, Best said the television module of that course also offered some challenges but they would be partnering with the Ministry of Education’s Media Research Centre to get more practice within that module. (CT)