NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
Eight Modest Proposals for a Strengthened Focus on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the Education for All (EFA) Agenda
By Kenneth King, University of Edinburgh and NORRAG
Email: Kenneth.King@ed.ac.uk
Keywords: EFA Goal 3; skills & poverty; enabling environment; informal sector skills; school-based TVE; financing.
Summary: These eight proposals derive from several bodies of work on skills development which have been completed in the last 3 years. They seek to extract from them some new ways of thinking about the topic, some priority areas and neglected issues, key topics, as well as data and research needs.
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1. Towards a conceptual clarification of skills
Arguably one of the reasons for the lack of progress in the analysis and monitoring of Goal 3 until the GMR 2010 was the uncertainty, both nationally and internationally, about the vague scope of ‘appropriate learning and life-skills programmes’ in the original text of the Dakar World Forum (King and Palmer, 2008). The GMR 2010, for the first time in the series of EFA volumes, changed all that; the focus was now much more on technical and vocational skills and skills development than on life-skills.
2. Skills development for poverty reduction
This has become almost as much of a mantra as skills for productivity, competitiveness and growth, and it has proved difficult for policy makers and donors to deal effectively with the competing agendas of skills for poverty reduction and skills for growth. There has been insufficient attention particularly, however, to whether the poorest and most marginalized groups in society actually access formal technical and vocational education, or formal vocational training. For the poorest segments, their prior low levels and low quality of formal education negatively affect access to and acquisition of both formal and informal technical and vocational skills (RECOUP, 2011).
3. Technical and vocational education and training and the enabling environment
Skills acquisition is very different from skills utilization, and especially for the poorest who can only access basic education of very low quality. Even for the less poor, in many countries, the teaching and learning of basic literacy and numeracy skills in primary and junior secondary schools are of appalling quality; hence the foundation for later, more specialized vocational skills is very weak. Added to that is the fact that the provision of formal technical and vocational education is often so awful that it constitutes a disabling environment for skills acquisition. But beyond the schools, the productive use of education or of skills in the workplace depends upon there being a dynamic or enabling environment for their utilization, as the World Bank famously pointed out in 1980 (Lockheed et al). Hence there is nothing automatic about the utilization of skills, whether basic literacy or more specialized vocational; they both require supportive local economic environments.
4. Training in the informal or unorganized sector
The supply of training outside the formal economy is widely acknowledged to be the main pathway for skills acquisition and utilization in many countries. And what has been said above about the enabling economic environment applies directly to this sector. Policy makers are now much more aware of the scale of such training, as compared to formal TVE or TVET, and they are attracted by the sheer size of the youth population that is involved in acquiring skills in this part of the private sector. Schemes to formalize what may be called the training side of the informal sector abound, including of the informal apprenticeship system.
5. School-based technical and vocational education
This remains an area of very considerable diversity in different regions, reflecting very different histories and international influences. First of all, the coverage is dramatically different, as the GMR 2010 (p.80) makes only too clear. South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Caribbean (all areas influenced, in large parts, historically by the UK) register very low TVE coverage of total secondary enrolment. Thus, South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean register 1%, 2% and 2% respectively. On the other hand, East Asia, Latin America and Central Asia total 11%, 10% and 11% respectively. Given that vocational specialization at the secondary stage is increasingly deferred to the upper secondary stage, these sets of figures point to a much lower enrolment than may actually be the case at upper secondary. (See further point 6 below.) Thus China had no less than 43% of its upper secondary school students in vocational schools in 2007, to take just one example (Kuczera and Field, 2010: 13).
6. Improving the monitoring of low-hanging fruits in relation to TVE, and noting the higher- hanging fruits in vocational training and in the informal sector
TVET information systems, including monitoring and evaluation of TVET supply, demand and financing are often woefully inadequate in most developing countries (King and Palmer, 2008). There are two main biases here: first a bias toward the monitoring of school-based TVE, rather than formal or informal vocational training, including apprenticeships; and second a bias toward the easier-to-collect supply side data. In the short term, supply side data on school- and college-based TVE as reported in the GMRs could certainly be improved.
7. Financing TVE and TVET
Globally, the drive to mobilize finance for TVET is much weaker than efforts to raise resources for academic schooling or higher education; thus, there is no Fast Track Initiative for TVET. There are some obvious reasons for this including the neglect (and conceptual confusion) of EFA Goal 3, the perceived difficulty of engaging in this area, and frustration with earlier attempts to finance TVET. Paradoxically, TVET has risen much higher up the agendas of both developing country and donor governments – but this is yet to really transform into noticeable shifts in funding.
8. Identifying the situation of the poorest young people in the global politics of skill development
In many countries, including most of South Asia, the reason that there are so few young people in school-based TVE or TVET institutions outside the school is that the main system for securing skills is through taking on young people as casual labour, and gradually selecting from these, after periods of low or no wage, those who can work with the mistris, or masters, formed by the same system. In other words, behind the figures of 80 to 90% of new jobs being in the informal, unorganized sector of the economy, there may be several skill development systems operating, including the massive system of skills-via-casual-labour.
Several of the countries of South Asia currently have the largest plans in their history for the expansion of their skilled labour force, including profiting from what India terms the ‘demographic dividend’ of having much larger numbers of young people (admittedly still unskilled) than China, or other Western or Eastern countries. Bangladesh, Pakistan and India all also intend to profit, through remittances, from the planned expansion of millions of migrant labourers. Currently, half of such migrant labour is unskilled, in the case of Bangladesh, and it is expected that with pre-migration up-skilling, the return will be much greater.
These traditions of millions of young people seeking to acquire skills through casual labour, and through internal and international migration are not only applicable to South Asia, but are also present in Latin America, as can be seen from accounts of the informal, casual work available to youth with the lowest levels of education in that region. With such young people in mind, it will be important to get behind the rhetoric of skills for poverty reduction and growth, and of more demand-led approaches, to recognize how particular cultures and traditions of work are already deeply affecting the poorest and most vulnerable young people.
[An earlier fuller version of this paper is available on the EFA GMR 2012 site: http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/ED/pdf/gmr2012-ED-EFA-MRT-PI-06.pdf]
References
King, K. and Palmer, R., 2008. Skill for work, growth and poverty reduction. Challenges and opportunities in the global analysis and monitoring of skills. British
Council and UK National Commission for UNESCO, London. Downloadable at: www.unesco.org.uk/uploads/SkillsforWorkGrowthandPovertyReduction-Sept08.pdf
Kuczera, M. and Field, S., 2010. Learning for jobs. OECD reviews of vocational education and training. Options for China. OECD, Paris.
Lockheed, M., Jamison, D. and Lau, L., 1980. Farmer Education and Farm Efficiency: A Survey. In King, T. (Ed.) Education and Income. World Bank Staff
Working Paper No.402, World Bank: Washington.
RECOUP, 2011. Palmer, R., Akabzaa, R., Janjua, S., King, K. and Noronha, C. (2011, forthcoming) Skill Acquisition and its Impact upon Lives and Livelihoods in Ghana, India, and Pakistan, in Colclough, C. (Ed) (2011, forthcoming) Education and Poverty in the South: Vol. 3 – Reassessing Education Outcomes, Education, Poverty and International Development Series, Routledge, London.
UNESCO, 2010. Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010. Reaching the marginalized. EFA GMR, at UNESCO, Paris
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Cite article as: King, K., (2011) ‘Eight Modest Proposals for a Strengthened Focus on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the Education for All (EFA) Agenda’, in NORRAG NEWS, Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark, No.46, September 2011, pp. 122-125, available: http://www.norrag.org
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