GOAL to take legal action against ISDC over breach of Staffordshire University Agreement

The Guyana Online Academy of Learning (GOAL) has announced that it will be moving to take legal action against the International Skill Development Corporation (ISDC), after it breached an agreement made between GOAL and the University of Staffordshire.

Over the past few weeks, GOAL has faced challenges over its partnership with United Kingdom-based Staffordshire University. GOAL courses through Staffordshire were supposed to be facilitated by the ISDC.

However, students recently raised concerns regarding the unavailability of programmes, which they had signed up for through Staffordshire University.

Providing an update on the issue on Sunday was GOAL’s Director Professor Jacob Opadeyi who highlighted that ISDC had failed to honour its contractual agreement with Staffordshire University by offering courses that were not agreed upon.

He further revealed that ISDC had failed to reach out to the institution to inform them about the ongoing issues with the University.

“The University of Staffordshire and ISDC decided not to honour the agreement between the two of them. And this is because ISDC was offering programmes outside the agreements that is signed with Staffordshire…,” the GOAL Director noted.

“The unfortunate thing is that neither of these parties informed me of this disagreement until February of this year. If we have known that in November there’s any disagreement between the two, we would not even have advertised our programme in December.”

On this point, Professor Opadeyi revealed that GOAL will be moving to take legal action against ISDC, as well as to cancel all future partnerships with the company.

“We are also very displeased that this matter hit the newspaper before we even know anything, and it has generated into a lot of unnecessary and untruthfulness. Our lesson that we have learned is that we will not do any business with ISDC again. We are going to go and get all the legal and financial remedy for this case,” he stated.

As it relates to persons who have completed courses through ISDC, Opadeyi revealed that the online academy is working closely with several of its partners to ensure these persons are accredited.

“Over the last five years, the many partners who believe in us, as far as in Spain, Germany, UK the Caribbean itself, India and in Africa. Since this incident occurred, several of them have written to us expressing their support and willing to accept our students and give the affected students credit for the work they have done.”

He further revealed that GOAL is working diligently to support prospective 2025 applicants in selecting alternative or comparable programmes offered by GOAL’s partners.

“But our focus in the last two weeks is the welfare of our students who are affected by this controversy. We have provided them opportunity to select other universities within the Gould partnership, and as of this afternoon, over 1,900 have selected universities that they wish to go to and for some who cannot see the programmes that they wanted in other universities, it is our duty to find partners who can offer them those programmes.”

Launched in 2021, GOAL was an initiative of the Government of Guyana to provide 20,000 scholarships to Guyanese to pursue online, tertiary level programmes via partnerships with reputable international universities.

Since assuming office in August 2020, Government has granted some 29,758 Guyanese citizens GOAL scholarships. Of that number, 5,980 individuals secured master’s degrees and PhDs.

In 2024, the Guyana Government approved almost 8000 GOAL scholarships, representing the administration’s continued efforts to ensure the country’s workforce and populace is better educated and skilled.