Revitalising TVET

THE INTENT announced by the deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education on December 2, at a regional conference in Port of Spain, to revitalise technical vocational education and training (TVET) is indeed welcomed and long overdue. This is a sector that has been made to languish for the past two decades owing to a combination of short-sighted planning and political deafness.

Unfortunately, these curriculum reform promises have been made before, but they turned out to be hollow, with the focus of both the primary and secondary school curricula remaining essentially the same – academic-based, despite the recognition of the importance of technical vocational education that dates back to the 1959 Maurice Report and later the UNESCO Mission Report of 1964, which recommended a mixture of academic and practical subjects being offered at the same secondary school.

The 1968-1983 Education Plan, funded by a World Bank loan (1968-1972/74), saw the establishment of the much-maligned junior and senior comprehensive schools, with TVET forming a central component of the curriculum offering.

There can be no doubt that the TVET graduates of those schools in the ensuing 50 plus years have contributed significantly to the industrial thrust of the country. Many ventured abroad to also distinguish themselves in TVET fields.

Unfortunately, this bold and innovative step in the education landscape, although aligned to a national industrialisation plan, was too much of a threat to the elitist education status quo, with TVET being myopically viewed from the same lens as traditional academic subjects and hence lesser in stature.

The net result was to first label these schools as "failures" by unfairly comparing them to the traditional "grammar-type" schools and then to gradually divert their focus away from TVET.

With the advent of the IDB-funded Secondary Education Modernisation Programme (SEMP) in 1999, where the emphasis was supposedly on the development of critical thinking, problem-solving and technological competence, TVET got its first major blow with the amalgamation of disparate TVET subjects into a hybrid known as technology education – one of eight core subjects for students of Forms 1-3.

Despite repeated warnings by TVET teachers that this hybrid subject will not form a sufficient foundation for students to pursue TVET subjects at the higher levels owing to its skills-training deficiency, this subject, for which there is no official curriculum or defined job description for its teachers, still form a part of the lower secondary school curriculum.

Large sums of monies were paid to foreign consultants to train people to deliver this dubious curriculum, for which teachers are yet to receive their certifications. The promised technology education laboratories never materialised.

The second major blow to TVET was the decision to discontinue the programme of TVET teacher-training at the John S Donaldson Technical Institute, with its amalgamation into the University of TT (UTT) in 2012.

A revamped bachelors TVET teacher training programme was now available to people desirous of teaching TVET. This programme has been unable to gain traction and the net effect has been a severe dearth of TVET teachers, causing many TVET subjects to be discontinued in many of the nation’s schools.

During the national consultations on education in early 2016, the incoming minister of education was virtually besieged by TTUTA to make a concerted effort to revitalise and resuscitate the TVET sector, having seen TVET departments in many schools virtually shut down owing to lack of teachers. TVET buildings and infrastructure were just wasting away, with some principals resorting to converting TVET posts in their schools to subjects for which there were available teachers.

TTUTA had to warn against this, mindful of the critical importance of TVET to our national development agenda. The economic fallout from this systematic conscious neglect of TVET is obvious with our country having to depend on imported skilled labour for many sectors, such as construction. Both the private and public sectors have been feeling the impact of the neglect of TVET education.

TVET is an area for which it was already very difficult to attract people to devote their skills for teaching purposes since they can command substantially higher compensation in the private sector. Conspicuously missing in the announcement though is how they intend to treat with the teacher-shortage issue.

The intention is a step in the right direction and is in tandem with the work already done to revamp and re-operationalise the youth camps. But the words must be followed by concrete action and TTUTA is ready and willing to be included in the dialogue.