Editorial | Reprise apprenticeship scheme

If Fayval Williams had kept up her guard, as this newspaper warned, she might have avoided the clutches of the bureaucrats at the education ministry who seem to be constantly poking around machines programmed to spew out pompous titles and acronyms, with letters that often stand for ‘pathway’. She might not now be burdened with the distraction the bureaucrats call the Sixth Form Pathway Programme (SFPP).

Minister Williams would, instead, have more time to better spend mobilising the education partners, excluding parents, to fully and safely reopen Jamaica’s schools for face-to-face classes to reverse the learning loss suffered by students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If she also wanted a practical initiative to stamp as her own, for students in the age group targeted by the SFPP, Ms Williams needed only to blow the cobwebs off the Apprenticeship Act; ask the labour minister, Karl Samuda, and/or Cabinet Office to dig through to the detritus of board appointments to determine whether an Apprenticeship Board was established; and insist to Prime Minister Andrew Holness that the HEART/NSTA Trust work with her ministry to relaunch, and fund, a credible apprenticeship scheme. She might have also asked the Germans for advice on how they run their own apprenticeship programme and for technical support for Jamaica to reprise its own.

New, woolly projects like the SFPP should have awaited receipt and public digestion of the report of Orlando Patterson’s task force on the future of Jamaica’s education system, which was recently presented to Prime Minister Holness. In the circumstances, the SFPP is like placing the cart before the horse.

SIGNIFICANT SHORTCOMINGS

The logic of concentrating on the catching-up on learning loss has been well ventilated. Even before the pandemic, Jamaica’s education system faced significant shortcomings, manifested in poor outcomes. With the onset of the pandemic, the authorities were forced to close nearly 1,000 primary and secondary schools (serving over 420,000 students) to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The alternative, online classes, has not worked well. During the first academic year of the pandemic, the education ministry reported that 120,000 students, approximately three in 10 of the enrolment, had no contact with their schools. Of those who logged on to classes, the attendance of one in three was patchy. These students often did not have the devices with which to do so, the Internet was not available, or they could not afford the service. Indeed, UNICEF, the UN’s children organisation, and local non-government education interests groups, estimated that during the first 19 months of the pandemic, students lost a combined 1.3 billion hours of engagement time with their teachers.

Catching up, therefore, is urgent. Which is why most rational people in the education business believe that the SFPP, aimed at extending the schooling of Jamaican students by two years, is at this time a distraction that still needs much work. The scheme, broadly, is predicated on students, at the end of their normal school-leaving period, grade 11 (fifth form), going on for an additional two years. They would be streamed on to the traditional academic track, technical/vocational training, or a more basic readiness for service-type employment. But as the scheme is now designed, they would remain enrolled at their original schools, even if they actually attended other institutions, including universities. In other words, ‘responsibility’ for tracking their performance would remain with their old schools, from which they would eventually graduate.

IMPOSSIBLE TO MANAGE

Most principals, rightly, insist that the system is unwieldy, impractical, and likely to be impossible to manage. It needs to be taken back to the drawing board and recrafted in the context of the findings of the Orlando Patterson review.

In any event, much of what is intended from this latest invocation is what should be happening in many programmes operated by the HEART/NSTA Trust, the Government’s cash-rich training agency, which is notorious for how it sloshes around taxpayers’ money, and the comatose national apprenticeship scheme, which the HEART/NSTA Trust essentially subsumed.

The problem with the HEART/NSTA Trust, which is funded by a three per cent payroll tax, is that perhaps because of its access to cash, it does nothing efficiently. A year ago, a review by the auditor general showed that over the five years, ending 2018-19, the HEART/NSTA Trust spent $30.5 billion on programmes that should have graduated more than 232,000 people at various levels of skills. Less than half (45 per cent) actually ‘graduated’.

External trainers were paid $8.3 billion to deliver some of that training, but their performance was even worse than the average – a graduation rate of 38 per cent. Some were as low as 19 per cent. More recently, there was the case, now under criminal investigation, of the millions of dollars flowing between the HEART/ NSTA Trust and the education ministry to pay for externally provided training schemes with weighty titles and acronyms like CAP, COS, and OAD – Career Advancement Programme, Centre for Occupational Studies, and Occupational Associate Degree, respectively.

These failures exist against the background of the nearly 70 per cent of Jamaicans who are not trained for the jobs they do and an ongoing decline in labour productivity. The revival of a structured apprenticeship scheme, as is happening in many developed countries, seems, in the circumstances, a sensible idea.

Among developed economies, Germany has the most celebrated apprenticeship programme. More than half of German school-leavers (55 per cent) enter an apprenticeship programme, and over 70 per cent graduate from the scheme – a system that couples shop-floor work with formal academic training. An estimated 400,000 companies offer vocational training positions. It is not surprising that nearly half of German workers have technical certification and that youth unemployment in that country is among the world’s lowest.

A creatively thought out apprenticeship programme in Jamaica, designed to embrace the island’s many small, informal businesses (including technicians), could be partially funded by the HEART/NSTA Trust. An important spin-off might be the formalising of many of these operations.