School Administrators Have Pivotal Role to Play in TVET’s Transition

Minister of Education, Hon. Rev.  Ronald Thwaites, says school administrators have a pivotal role to play in transitioning Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) into the general education system.

The Minister, who was addressing principals of schools in Regions 3 and 4, in Montego Bay recently, urged the educators to play their part in the transformation process.

“All of this is part of a profound transformation in our education system that I invite you to understand, to embellish, and to become a part of your own practices,” he told the principals.

The University of the West Indies (UWI) School of Education, along with other tertiary institutions, HEART Trust/NTA as well as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization-Vocational Education (UNESCO-UNEVOC), is supporting the Ministry’s programme to mainstream TVET in the general education system.

The TVET policy that is being advanced includes all high schools at the secondary level. However, the Minister pointed out that “technical and vocational competencies are not for high schools alone.”

Rev. Thwaites said the model developed by the Ministry, “which forms the grounding of our policy, is that from the early childhood level up , there has to be a new orientation towards doing things and learning through  doing , rather than learning through watching, reading and listening.”

He argued that while past teaching methods have been good and have served the society and economy well, that paradigm no longer applies.

“They no longer apply, because the marketplace of the economy is saying to us…we need different skills; we need a constant innovative element in education and therefore we need people who are not qualified in the classical ways, but people whose minds are nimble, whose capacity is to flexibly move from one task to the next, to be innovative…that is what prosperity undergirded by productivity is about. This requires a profound change of approach  – fruitful but difficult,” Rev. Thwaites contended.