Leadership empowerment and achieving academic targets will be the key goals of next week’s principals’ retreat, which will be hosted for all school principals in Tobago.

The retreat is tentatively scheduled for September 13. Chief Secretary Kelvin Charles, who is also Secretary of Education, Innovation and Energy, said the two issues are indelibly linked.

“Where leadership is weak, then performance is not as strong,” Charles said during yesterday’s (September 5) post Executive Council media briefing.

He added: “As we seek to clinically improve the performance level of our schools, we need to get into some specifics as far as target setting and therefore the principles will be engaged in that kind of activity so that they can benchmark their performance.”

Charles said the event was scheduled early to guide the performance of the principles over the school year.