Prime Min­is­ter-in-wait­ing Stu­art Young says he has a lot of youth-fo­cused plans for T&T. 

While he awaits Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s of­fi­cial ex­it from the post—ex­pect­ed in March—to step in­to his new role, Young yes­ter­day teased some of his plans, in­clud­ing chang­ing the ed­u­ca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum and en­gag­ing more with the na­tion’s youth. 

But pressed about a time­line to take over as PM and ex­e­cute these plans, Young on­ly said he would take over when the prime min­is­ter re­signs. 

Asked what his first or­der of busi­ness would be, Young replied, “Stand by, and we will see.” 

Ad­dress­ing sec­ondary school stu­dents at the He­roes Foun­da­tion awards cer­e­mo­ny at Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Plaza, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, a jovial Young said he wants to change the coun­try’s cur­rent ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem—shift­ing from the colo­nial struc­ture to one that’s more re­lat­able to our cul­ture. 

“One of the things I’m plan­ning for the fu­ture is how do we change the ed­u­ca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum. How do we in­ter­vene now and start to shed our­selves of the colo­nial cur­ricu­lum that we have? How do we make it more rel­e­vant to­day to give our fu­ture cit­i­zens the best op­por­tu­ni­ties not on­ly here, but glob­al­ly?

“So stand by, stand by. At the right time you will start to hear the ex­cit­ing things that are go­ing to be tak­ing place in Trinidad and To­ba­go for you, the young peo­ple and the cit­i­zens. How do we in­cor­po­rate AI? How do we in­cor­po­rate tech­nol­o­gy? We have to ac­knowl­edge that not every­one is aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly dri­ven.” 

Young said the youth will play a piv­otal role in his plans for the coun­try when he be­comes prime min­is­ter.

“I have now been charged with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of plan­ning the fu­ture of Trinidad and To­ba­go, and you, the young peo­ple, are such a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of that. I want to as­sure you all on the out­set that I in­tend for us in the Gov­ern­ment to en­gage you be­cause all we’re do­ing is man­ag­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go for a short while be­fore we pass it over to you. We the Gov­ern­ment, and me in par­tic­u­lar, give the com­mit­ment to en­gage with you, to get your views, to get you on board with us,” Young said.  

He al­so en­cour­aged young­sters to be more pa­tri­ot­ic as he high­light­ed the re­cent changes to the Coat of Arms.  

He said they should take pride in their coun­try.

 “Get on to the wave that will come. Let us start to build the mo­men­tum that we need to take Trinidad and To­ba­go for­ward, and I look for­ward to en­gag­ing with you, the young peo­ple, to hear your views, to hear your thoughts, to hear what it is you think we should be think­ing of in our de­ci­sion-mak­ing as we go for­ward to build our Trinidad and To­ba­go, be­cause no per­son, no one group has any en­ti­tle­ment to Trinidad and To­ba­go. It is ours.”