THE Egyptian Ministry of Education is working now on a draft proposal to develop the secondary level of the education system through out the country, Minister of Education Ahmed Zaki Badr has said. The proposal targets both the general secondary course Thanawya Amma and technical and vocational secondary courses. It aims at creating a variety of choices for secondary students to subsequently facilitate their decision whether to enrol for higher education or to join the work force. “There is a fixed strategy applied by the Government towards educational development that is crucial now, especially when we bear in mind the needs of the labour market,” Badr told a conference in Cairo on Monday entitled “Building Effective Employer Engagement”, the conference was concerned with the effective involvement of businesspeople and the private sector in developing technical and vocational education. Badr, who was assigned to the job last January, stressed that vocational education in Egypt needs a push forward, especially to bridge the gap between employers and school-leavers and graduates. “I worked closely with industries and have seen the problems of industrialists in finding appropriate and, as well, have seen the number of graduates who couldn't find any job opportunities,” Badr explained. “Bridging this gap, the business sector must have a bigger role in the education of those students and curricula must bear in mind the needs of the labour market.” In Egypt, around 8.4 per cent of the labour force are unemployed, according to official data in 2009. This number is partially attributed to the mentioned gap between education and employability needs. Trying to bridge this gap, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research is working on a plan for expanding of higher education and to engage the private sector closely in the development of education. Hani Helal, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research ��" who also attended the conference ��" pointed out the higher education expansion plan is mainly concerned with targeting technical and vocational education. Moreover, Helal gave several examples of such partnerships between educational institutions and private companies that have resulted in a group of well-educated, highly skillful graduates, who were directly employed after acquiring their degrees. “We are working on a programme in which we accredited around 50 per cent of the students' marks in their practical training in a private food manufacturing company, while the rest of the marks were distributed on the online and direct academic classes and exams,” Helal said. “The positive thing about it was that the graduates were really appreciated in their spheres,” he said. Technical and vocational training in Egypt lags behind in terms of social preference, as it is socially perceived as second- degree education. Although several projects, seminars and conferences are working on the practical and financial technicalities of this type of education, the social aspect of the issue should not be ignored. As vocational education in the current Egyptian educational system is a secondlevel substitute for the most popular Thanawya Amma, and does not necessarily qualify the school leavers to pursue higher education, students from the lower socio economic classes usually follow it. “We cannot improve the way vocational training is perceived through words only,” Hossam Badrawi, Chairman of Education Committee in the National Democratic Party, told The Gazette. “For us to do so, we must first improve the students' educational and then job circumstances. At this point, everyone will automatically respect them.” The two-day conference that wraps up today is organised by the British Council in Egypt together with the National Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Reform Project. It gathered representatives from the private sector, vocational education training centres from Egypt and the UK along with Government representatives. “The employer knows better the needs of the industry so taking part in the educational process means better qualification for the graduates,” Paul Smith, the Director of the British Council, said. “We are bringing employers and education representatives together here to reach resolutions about the next steps so that they'd merge together for the good of everyone involved.”
