Over 120,000 students enrolled in HEART since removal of tuition

The HEART/NSTA Trust has seen a 15 per cent increase in enrollment since the removal of tuition and administrative fee requirements for courses up to associate level, Government Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon has disclosed.

She was responding to queries about how the elimination of the fees have impacted HEART/NSTA Trust’s operations at this week’s sitting of the Standing Finance Committee. 

Dixon revealed that more than 120,000 students have been enrolled since the removal of the fees in April 2023 to January this year, compared to the 129,957 students who were enrolled for the year 2022. 

“There is obviously a little bit of a lag because when we do decrease the fees, we saw the uptick in demand for the programmes, but you’re not able to expand the number of trainers as quickly as you can,” she said. 

Prime Minister Andrew Holness, in March last year, announced the removal of fees for the courses in a range of areas up to Level IV during his contribution to the Budget Debate. 

At the time, HEART/NSTA Trust’s Managing Director, Dr Taniesha Ingleton, said that she expected an increase in uptake of between 30 and 50 per cent. She was also quick to give the assurance that her agency was ready to work to ensure the success of this new directive.

However, stakeholders expressed concerns about the HEART/NSTA Trust’s capacity to manage the expected influx of students due to an alleged shortage of teachers at the institution. 

Teachers who spoke with The Gleaner in May last year on condition of anonymity, claimed the organisation suffered from a high turnover rate of educators because of what they described as major inefficiencies in the institution’s administration.

But Ingleton noted at the time that in preparation for the influx, HEART had been doing “quite a lot”. This, she said, involved designing a framework to attract, recruit, train and retrain qualified instructors to meet the growing needs.

She stated that the training institution had 1,243 instructors as of April 2023, with 259 employed full-time and 984 part-time.

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