Robert Gregory | Not so fast, Minister Williams

I FELT compelled to share an alternative perspective on Education Minister Fayval Williams’ July 2 article titled ‘TVET is critical to meeting job market needs’.

In 1990, one outcome from the deliberations among the member states of CARICOM as to how the region should respond to the imposed forces of trade liberalisation and the globalisation of standards for products, services and skills, was the CARICOM TVET Strategy. A key initiative of that strategy was the agreement that each member state would establish a national training agency to coordinate and regulate the training and certification of their workforce to international standards, covering all occupations in all sectors of their economy. The intention was that such a trained workforce would enable their employing firms to be more competitive against their global counterparts and thereby make the Jamaican economy more globally competitive.

JOB SKILLS

The then Government of Jamaica decided not to establish a new statutory body, but to select an existing statutory body – The HEART Trust – to assume the mandate of the national training agency. The employer three per cent of wage bill-funded HEART Trust was established in 1982 and had been successfully providing technical vocational training to help young Jamaicans acquire job skills to transition from school to enter the workforce.

Its first initiative was through its On-the-Job School Leavers’ Training Programme for high-school graduates with GCE/CSEC credentials, and subsequently through its institution-based academies programme geared for working-age young people without secondary school-leaving certification. HEART was a disruptive intervention for the educational establishment, which was at the time oblivious to the dilemma faced by hundreds of GCE-credentialed high-school graduates without job skills, sitting at home unable to earn a livelihood or earn the money to pay the fees for their higher education ambitions. However, it was the introduction of the highly profiled and well-resourced HEART Academies Programme that violated deeply held beliefs in the education establishment about the appropriate rung on the education ladder for technical vocational training.

NEGRO EDUCATION GRANT

These beliefs of the education establishment were derived from the tenets of the Negro Education Grant of 1835-1845. A bill passed in the British House of Commons was designed to secure the continuation of British plantation society and economy in the post-Emancipation era, and still fundamentally informs the philosophy and practice of education in Jamaica. One aspect of which manifests itself in the apartheid stratification of both the primary and secondary levels of the system as has evolved, unwittingly supporting the 19th-century belief that our post-Emancipation population consists of the few bright and academically inclined, and the many who are good with their hands and best suited for vocational training (skills training) for manual occupations. This societal stigmatisation of technical vocational training actually caused Jamaicans to not acknowledge that the first and still the most successful programme of HEART was its On-the-Job School Leavers’ Training Programme that certified high-school graduates, because once HEART extended its services to persons without secondary-school certification through its academies programmes, HEART and TVET became stigmatised.

CRITICAL ASPECT

I was seconded from the private sector to lead the repositioning and restructuring of the HEART Trust organisation, enabling it to assume the mandate of Jamaica’s national training agency, and to become, in 1991, the HEART Trust-NTA. A critical aspect of the NTA infrastructure was the establishment of the National Council on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (NCTVET), the ISO-accredited, semi-autonomous body responsible for TVET industry standards-based quality assurance, institutional accreditation, competency assessment and certification. The other aspect was to incorporate the Vocational Training Development Institute (VTDI), which was established in 1970 by the International Labour Organization. The VTDI is a tertiary-level institution principally responsible for the training and certification of TVET instructors.

In the period between 1991 and the present, the old Jamaican economy of primary industry sectors, assembly manufacturing and extractive industries, generating repetitive, elementary, low-skilled jobs has transformed into a services-based economy which now contributes approximately 80 per cent of our GDP. The jobs generated in these service industry sectors are best characterised as ‘knowledge work’; these jobs require workers to master a “body of knowledge” and perfect their “skilled application” of the body of knowledge to innovate, solve problems and create value for their respective employers or client organisations. Workers in this current dispensation must commit to lifelong learning to continually evolve with the new and emerging technologies to create even greater value and innovation. The greatest challenge facing our country now is to radically transform our early-childhood, primary and secondary education as a process which effectively empowers and enables ALL our students to create value and to become the very embodiment of value, and be prepared to utilise higher education and TVET to qualify, requalify, upskill, and reskill, creating a high-quality Jamaican workforce that can attract high-value, job-creating investments and entrepreneurial opportunities to sustain a prosperous people.

ALARMED

While I share the minister’s emphasis on the better use of TVET for the preparation of persons with the skills needed in the job market, and also highly supportive of Prof Orlando Patterson’s recommendation to reposition TVET more centrally in the education system, I was alarmed at the minister’s declared intention to introduce TVET at the primary level of our education system for the following reasons:

1. TVET is about the preparation with the knowledge, skills and attitudes for specific work and careers. The orientation of students to work and careers is done using the career guidance and counselling process, which is practised currently in education systems around the world. Students at the primary level are guided through the first phase of the process referred to as career awareness; wherein, they are made aware of the various industry sectors in the country, along with being made aware of all the various occupations and careers to be found in each of these sectors, including the public sector.

2. The second phase of the process is for students at the junior secondary level and referred to as career exploration, wherein students conduct indepth research, including interviewing workers for the variety of occupations that they expressed an interest in. This stage culminates with the application of a career aptitude and interest assessment exercise, resulting in each student being informed and clearer about the occupation/career they wish to pursue and that is best suited for them.

3. The third and final phase of the process is for students at the upper secondary level referred to as career preparation, or TVET, wherein they are trained in their chosen or an allied occupation, assessed and certified competent to enter their chosen occupation along with their earned CSEC subjects, which together enable them to work or also matriculate to higher education and training if they chose, in their journey of lifelong learning.

TVET is not an alternative to general primary and secondary education, it is the preparation, assessment and certification for work.

Patterson report revealed that over 57 per cent of our children leaving the primary level are functionally illiterate and innumerate. My question to Minister Williams is, for what jobs in today’s knowledge economy could TVET, infused at the primary level, prepare these 11-year-old children to perform?

Robert L. Gregory CD, JP, is a former executive director of the HEART/NSTA Trust, co-author of the 2014 CARICOM Regional TVET Strategy for Workforce Development and Economic Competitiveness, consultant and teaching Fellow at the Mona School of Business and Management, UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.