Apprenticeship programme starts September

Page 31
07-07-08

THE National Apprenticeship Programme, under which the government will provide one-year support for junior high school (JHS) graduates who could not qualify for senior high schools and technical institutions, is expected to begin in September this year.
The programme, which will be carried out on a pilot basis in 80 districts, will involve 15,000 JHS graduates who will be attached to master craftsmen in their communities to undergo training.
The Chairman of the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET), Mr Napoleon Bulley, disclosed this in an interview with the Daily Graphic at a training workshop for a technical team on units specification writing in Accra last Wednesday.
The programme was organised by the Technical and Vocational Education Training Support Project (TVETS Project) which was implemented through the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA).
According to Mr Bulley, since the inauguration of COTVET, a lot had been done to get the programme started, adding that COTVET had given a new impetus to technical and vocational education training.
He said about 160,000 JHS graduates did not qualify for second-cycle institutions because of lack of places and indicated that that could not be allowed to continue, as it was a serious waste of human resource.
He said there was the need to change the perception that TVET was for those who were not academically good to enable the reform become successful.
Mr Bulley said the challenge for COTVET and the reform of TVET was to enhance the capacity of the TVET system to equip Ghanaian youth for the world of work, saying that “our TVET programmes should not give trainees only skills that are relevant to industry but also skills that are of world class standard”.
The Chief Advisor for the TVETS project, Mr Kenji Kimura, noted that to change the wrong perception about TVET, TVET producers, industry and the media needed to work together to make it attractive to the youth.
Mr Kimura said the occupational standards generated in the first training workshop would be validated by industry representatives for education and training, assessing and recognising the skills and knowledge of people.