Corporate Jamaica funds PEP online programme

Students preparing for the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams will have free access to the EduFocal LIVE online classes during the month of April. This is because corporate Jamaica has donated $10 million to offset costs to use the platform.

Since EduFocal Limited started offering the free service on March 13, the company has seen close to a 30,000 peak in active parents’ user accounts for local students, across grades four to six, to access the online learning community’s extensive PEP practice tests and other learning resources.

The companies which stepped in to support the initiative are Wisynco Group Limited, Tru-Juice, National Baking Company Foundation and JP St Mary’s.

Chief executive officer and co-founder of the eight-year-old social learning community, Gordon Swaby, said that the collaborative approach stemmed from the high uptake of the service since Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced the temporary closure of schools, effective March 13.

“The Ministry of Education was in dialogue with us as soon as the first COVID-19 case was confirmed on March 10. Our immediate concern was to assist with the consistent engagement of students preparing for the Primary Exit Profile examinations, and so we agreed to waive costs for the announced 14-day school closure,” Swaby said.

“EduFocal offers a user-friendly platform with a sophisticated back-end which enables us to comfortably facilitate the full 2020 cohort of Jamaica’s PEP students [approximately 120,000]. We were fully prepared to foot the cost to run the platform for the 14-day school closure which ended on March 26,” Swaby added.