Among the many changes which need to be made to decrease crime in TT, the Prime Minister said the school curriculum needs to be changed so that fewer students leave secondary school without improvement and are less susceptible to being drawn into crime.

Dr Rowley made the commets while speaking at a Breakfast with the PM event at the Hilton Hotel and Conference Centre on Wednesday.

He said, while the large majority of TT’s young people were well prepared to have a decent life and to contribute, "Unfortunately there are a significant amount of young people who are passing through our school system and coming out of it having not benefited from any improvement.

"Once we made a decision that everybody goes to high school, the questions then remain, what of those children who entered the secondary school system not having been readied in the primary system? When they get to the secondary school system, what is the curriculum that we’re going to follow? Is it a curriculum that sees the school as a continuation, or a curriculum of the secondary school they can’t cope with?

“Those two questions need to be answered, because as long as they’re not answered and they’re glossed over. You will have a number of young people, especially young males, coming out of the system totally unprepared for life in the national community. Those are the ones who largely end up in the hands of the drug dealers and the smart men who organise gangs and so on. And what is their skill that they carry? Criminal conduct.”

Rowley said any conversation around the matter had to result in change.

“There’s no point of being against change if you’re only going to point out all the problems with the current. If you have problems when you access the current situation, you ought then to be sufficiently broadminded and ready for change.”

He said under the colonial system, it was a privilege to be able to go to high school, and those who did came out as contributing citizens.

“Today, when everybody is going into the system, the system is not ready for everybody. Therefore, there is a significant amount of waste, with people passing through the system, and they in that system also frustrate the teachers.

"Some of the teachers do less than teaching, because the process overwhelms them. And, of course, we have a large proportion of parents who are not doing their parenting, even in taking the responsibility of sending the child to school, and too many of them believe the government is responsible for them. The first responsibility for children is in the home.”

Rowley noted that, since 1956 and for many years, the largest budget allocation went to the Education Ministry. He said it was disturbing when that allocation switched to the National Security Ministry.

“Now we have to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to national security to respond to the misbehaviour of certain citizens. If we didn't have to allocate this money to control this misbehaviour, it could be allocated to health, infrastructure, education, and so on. So the more