By Robert A Emmanuel
Learning from experience would be the best choice for building national student councils and nurturing the ability of student leadership.
That was the advice given by the Commonwealth Students Association’s (CSA) Caribbean and Americas Regional Representative, Alicia Ramdal.
OECS Ministers of Education last week announced that they were going to examine how to establish national student councils in OECS countries where they do not exist.
This announcement was part of the youth inclusivity push of the OECS Council of Ministers.
Observer spoke to Ramdal yesterday about the advice she had for governments looking to establish student councils within their countries.
“The advice would be to look at what has worked throughout the Caribbean, at the models that have worked and try to implement them as far as possible, taking into account the nuances that a particular country might have,” she said.
National student councils are not a new phenomenon in the Caribbean or OECS region with Dominica, St Lucia and Jamaica all having well-established organisations.
She explained that Education Ministries should not look at the student councils as “something that checks a box.”
She noted that Antigua and Barbuda has long had provisions within its 2008 Education Act for a national student council that has yet to be actualised.
“Youth and students know the experiences of their education system at the time—they are living it every day—it is the most important thing to some of them, so their experiences need to be highly valued when it comes to education policy development,” she explained.
She added that with the development of new technologies and the evolution of society around those technologies, student voices needed to be heard, more so than persons who “have already left the education system.”
The Commonwealth Students Association, established in 2012 at the 18th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in Mauritius, has long seen student rights and welfare as part of its priority mandate.
In referencing Jamaica, Ramdal noted that student councils can and have proven to be valuable for students.
“Covid was a big time where we saw the strength of national student unions where in Jamaica, for example, their union was able to advocate for the zero-rating of school platforms for tertiary students,” she explained.
However, she noted that challenges abound for any national student organisation, including access to reliable financing, political interference and lack of training.
“The struggles that youth organisations face in general is…funding. These organisations are underfunded, which limits the extent to which their representation is taken seriously, to participate in high level discussions.
“We have also seen problems with political interference where in some countries, we have seen the national student organisation—which we advocate strongly to be non-partisan and impartial in its representation—sometimes [allow] politics to get involved, and the views may not necessarily reflect the interest of the organisation,” she said.
She also explained that the lack of training for student leaders has been another challenge.
“Sometimes, the organisation is here, they have a steering committee or have even reached a stage where they have an elected committee, but still there is no real entity responsible for training them in education policy, development and advocacy,” she noted, explaining that these are key for any independent sustainable organisation.
The regional representative revealed that her organisation hopes to hold an Eastern Caribbean Student Governance Training Workshop in St Lucia to understand better the student council model in the country as well as build the capacity of student representatives from across the region.
Ramdal, who is an attorney-at-law by profession from Trinidad and Tobago, has actively contributed to youth spaces serving in several roles, including as an executive member of the Caribbean Women in Leadership T&T chapter.