NN38, February 2007
Technical and Vocational Skills Development
TOWARD COMPULSORY VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN UZBEKISTAN: A DECADE ON
By Yakov Asminkin and Olga Nemirovskaya, ?TAHLIL? Centre for Social Research, Tashkent
KeywordsVocational education, Uzbekistan, National Professional Training Programme
Summary
In 1997 Uzbekistan embarked on the globally unprecedented National Professional Training Programme that envisaged a gradual transition to compulsory universal vocational education for all. This article examines the implementation process of this unique programme.
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In 1997 Uzbekistan embarked on the globally unprecedented National Professional Training Programme (NPTP) that envisaged a gradual transition to compulsory universal vocational education for all (9 years of secondary school + 3 years compulsory vocational education at college or lyceum) by 2009. In a country with a population of 26.5 million, the physical infrastructure that enabled the development of the vocational secondary education sector was built in a record-breaking time. After the NPTP was adopted, public budget resources, allocated to the education sector, began to be redistributed in favour of the secondary specialized vocational education system. Public budget spending for the secondary specialized vocational education was fairly stable with the share of some 7.5% of total budget per year. The vast majority of this spending for the system of secondary specialized vocational education was centralized investments in the construction and reconstruction of the educational establishments within this system (64% and 61% of total spending for the system of secondary specialized vocational education in 2004 and 2005 respectively). In addition to prioritized state-run financing, significant donor funds were invested in the system of secondary specialized vocational education, totaling to at least USD$300 million. As a result, by the beginning of 2006?2007 academic year, 957 vocational colleges and 99 academic lyceums were constructed and reconstructed and a lot of work was done to change the appropriate state standards, curricula and retraining of teaching staff.
Apart from problems typical of any vocational education system (quality of training, professional-skill imbalance, etc.), the implementation process of this unique programme encountered certain specific problems:
* Scarce funding made it impossible to meet the planned student space: between 1998-2005 the programme for operationalizing new buildings for vocational education was met by not more than 55%. Nearly 550,000 school students graduate from the basic secondary school (9 forms) every year in Uzbekistan. In the 2005-2006 academic year, 56% of adolescents within the respective age group (788,000 people) were covered by the system of secondary specialized vocational education, while the rest of them either continued to obtain education in the 10th and 11th forms, or quit school education after graduating from the 9th form. Thus, to ensure 100% coverage of the school students with vocational education, the capacity of the secondary specialized vocational education system (i.e., student space) has to be doubled within the next three years (in numerical terms, 1,700 colleges and lyceums are required in total). To achieve the aforementioned value, centralized investment in comparable prices should be 5 times higher than the current level of investment.
* A new concept of education effectively does not envisage training of specialists that belong to groups VII and VIII of the ISCO-88, that is, the specialists of working professions. With the 3-year vocational training, the graduates obtain higher skills than the existing jobs require. This situation is ineffective not only in terms of financial resources spent for training such specialists, but also it causes a gap between the job-related expectations of these graduates and the status that will be offered to them in the labour market. However, some vocational college graduates who have certain professions (e.g., teachers, legal professionals, health professionals, etc.) cannot find jobs because the national legislation provides for certain restrictions as regards employing professionals without higher education.
* Another major problem is the ineffective sectoral and geographical distribution of colleges. In many rayons (administrative districts) there are no colleges providing training in such important sectors as transport, telecommunication, and the energy industry. Whereas 27% of the total number of college graduates obtain medical and teaching qualifications. Given the low mobility of labour resources, this situation makes the imbalance, that currently exist in occupational labour markets, notably larger.
* The current system of vocational education causes contradiction between the principle of universality of education and the right to free choice of profession in consistence with one?s likings and understanding of occupational demand in the labour market. At present, specialised colleges are training students in more than 300 occupational areas. Given the uneven geographic distribution of colleges, young people living in some rayons have access to training in 50 occupational areas. Entering colleges in other localities is usually difficult (college administrations first of all must ensure coverage of youth with training in their respective rayons, the number of hostels for college students is reduced every year, and high expenditures for transport and living needs also constrain the opportunity of obtaining education far from home).
As regards the timeframe for putting the planned number of colleges into operation (consequently, transition to universal vocational education), this problem will be solved, even though with certain delays. Addressing other specific problems in the Uzbekistani vocational education system, some fundamental changes are being discussed, specifically:
1. Aggregating the number of occupational areas for training from 300 to a maximum of 10-20 and developing new state standards and curricula;
2. Grouping related professions within each occupational area of training and developing training modules for professions so that students could obtain 3-4 professions, corresponding to VII-VIII groups of ISCO-88, or 1-2 professions, corresponding to III group, within 3 years;
3. Transition to the system of multi-area colleges, i.e., the system, in which every college or most of the colleges will provide vocational training in all 10-20 occupational areas.
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