Education ministry urges teachers’ colleges to recruit overseas students

GREEN ISLAND, Hanover — Dr Kasan Troupe, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, says Jamaica is working to counter the outflow of educators by forging overseas partnerships that would allow teachers’ colleges here to prepare people who then apply those competencies abroad.

“A number of international spaces want our teachers. They go to England, they go to Japan, they go to the United States, and sometimes create a crisis for us right here in Jamaica. Now we want our tertiary sector — our teachers’ colleges — to look at how we can bring people into Jamaica to benefit from our programmes of learning so they can build their own skill set and their own people and leave our people alone so we can benefit from them right here in Jamaica,” stated Troupe.

She spoke with the media after delivering remarks on the second day of the first Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information Higher Education Leadership Conference 2026, staged Thursday at Princess Grand Jamaica Hotels and Resorts in Green Island, Hanover.

Troupe described what the approach could deliver. “We want to export the excellence of our teachers’ colleges into the global space and see how Jamaica can benefit from that in terms of building the synergies with international colleges and bringing home other programmes that we need to modernise our sector that have already been built, like the STEAM programme, the TVET programme, the AI programmes that are already out there. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. What we need is partnerships,” the permanent secretary explained.

Caribbean Maritime University already sends its educational strengths abroad, she noted, and she wants teachers’ colleges and other tertiary schools to follow that path. “Whilst we have a number of our tertiary institutions talking about a decline in enrolment, CMU has boasted an increase in their enrolment because of intentional partnerships. Now we have our programmes here serving international students, and some of whom are in Jamaica building and learning from us. What a wonderful way to export our excellence in the tertiary sector,” stated Troupe.

“We are talking about that and helping our leaders here to replicate that. And we want to look at that for our teachers’ colleges,” added the permanent secretary.

On upgrading the tertiary landscape, she said the ministry is supporting colleges to adjust and work together, which will involve sharpening their remits. “We’re asking them to give up some of the programmes that you don’t really need, or allow those programmes to move to the particular colleges that have the expertise to do that. It’s a simple thing like probably staying in our lane a little bit, focusing on the intentions of that area. We want our community colleges to focus on becoming community colleges, creating access to tertiary learning at an affordable rate in partnership with the universities in the local spaces where the young people are,” stated Troupe.

“We want to give access all over Jamaica, and that’s part of why the community colleges exist. You can go to your associate degrees and then you can move into your full-fledged bachelor programmes. We’re helping the system to structure themselves, we’re building out the tertiary ecosystem so we can serve. And we’re looking at the programme…We have said to them: We see what we need for the industries to grow. We need some emerging areas to be in our tertiary sector to serve the national priorities,” added Troupe.

The conference runs for three days under the theme ‘Transformational Leadership for Institutional Excellence and Sector Renewal’. It convenes heads of Jamaica’s publicly funded higher education institutions, board chairs, officials from major sector agencies, and ministry staff to review how to fortify institutional leadership, tighten governance, lift student outcomes, strengthen quality assurance, and ready the higher education system for shifting national and international demands.