Education and Training Systems in the Caribbean: Imposed, Voluntary and Indigenous Routes?

As a consequence external agencies play a negligible role in determining the type of education or training policies implemented in Barbados and instead the government is more successful at linking such policies to their country's economic development needs, highlighting an indigenous route to skill formation. Thus, a central question to be addressed in the present chapter is whether education and training policies in the region are facilitating economic restructuring or whether they are just being shaped by the process. The first of these outlines the structures and compositions of education and training systems prior to the major structural change that occurred in the Caribbean over the 1970s to the 1980s. It is possible to point to theoretical typology of Caribbean Skill Formation in which Barbados follows an ingenious route, Jamaica an imposed one and St. Lucia a voluntary one.